You might thing that the simple act of a weapon reload would be easy to figure out in Mass Effect Legendary Edition. Things are more complicated than that though, especially when you’re combining three games that span multiple genres and many years of game design development. For ME2 and ME3 it actually is pretty simple and works how you expect, but Mass Effect 1 was kind of unique. To explain it all, here’s how to reload in Mass Effect Legendary Edition.
How to Reload in Mass Effect Legendary Edition
The simple answer for how to reload in Mass Effect 1 as part of the Legendary Edition is that you don’t. The first game in the series did a lot of stuff that was different, even for its time. One of those was to have guns use a cooldown system, rather than standard ammo and clips.
What this means in practice is that you can’t and don’t have to reload your weapons in Mass Effect 1, even in the Legendary Edition. Instead you need to burst fire and keep an eye on the heat gauge in the bottom left of the screen. When it starts to fill up it means the gun is too hot. You can wait a little bit and it will cool down. If you keep firing it will overheat and lock up for a short amount of time. You just need to give it a few seconds and you’ll be back in fighting shape.
For Mass Effect 2 and 3 Bioware went back to ammo, switching to “thermal clips” that soak up the heat and are ejected. Obviously this is just a story conceit to give gamers what they want: the ability to reload. To do it you just tap Square on PS4/PS5 or X on Xbox One or Series X/S. This takes some of the uniqueness out of the Mass Effect universe, but gamers seemed to think it was for the best.
And that’s how to reload in Mass Effect Legendary Edition.
