Mass Effect

The Good
Mass Effect really propels certain elements of the Action-RPG to new heights. First off, the ability to create an avatar of either sex and any facial type and ethnicity is a welcome ability. Too many games make you play as the same old chiseled/effeminate white dude. Any variety is a very good thing.

The conversation aspects of the game couldn’t be discussed without talking about the plot and voice acting, so let me address all of them at once. This game is based around talking; the combat is really just a way to get to the next conversation, but these are conversations which I love, and couldn’t be happier with. Unlike most Western RPGs that involve a customizable main character, your hero will speak every line of dialogue (there are two voices for your character, one male, one female).

As is often the case with Bioware, the main character and the other characters are all well acted. The dialogue is pretty good, for the most part, and even minor characters have well thought out lines of dialogue, delivered with care. The thing that really sets all this apart from other RPGs is how you conduct conversations. Instead of dialogue trees, you have a wheel. Instead of full sentences, you have the gist of the intended remark. Select the appropriate part of the wheel (maybe it says “no way”) and you character will say “Absolutely not, there has to be another way.”

Luckily, the facial animations in-game are up to the task of conveying emotion, and every conversation has camera angles like those in a movie. You’ll want to listen to every line of dialogue. The plot of Mass Effect is satisfying, and once it gets going, you’ll be drawn into this new world that Bioware has created. You can act in both self-sacrificing (“paragon”) or reckless (“renegade”) ways, and both provide interesting results. This time around, they don’t have to Star Wars license to help support their game, but with th next game in the series, I can see the world of Mass Effect becoming more and more compelling.

As far as exploration and combat goes, I enjoyed the combat, leveling and “magic” (biotics) elements. There are plenty of ways to develop your three character party, and 6 characters to choose for each mission (along with your own character, Commander Shepard). Combat is difficult at first, but you quickly get used to it. It may not have to slick feel of Drake’s Fortune, but it serves the story section of the game well enough.

Again, the plotline of Mass Effect is extremely intriguing, and the fact that your character is always working to save the galaxy makes the game intriguing. You might be committing murders and other horrible acts, but your character will always feel that their actions are necessary. Controlling a dangerous, violent, short-fused vigilante is invigorating and terrifying. You’ll be surprised and frightened as your avatar calmly explains how she had to kill those innocent people. She’s saving the galaxy, after all.

The problem is, you’ll see how she could be right, every time. From a technical standpoint, Mass Effect succeeds and fails. The characters look amazing, the effects are pretty, and the world is fully realized and very detailed. This is a new world, a new galaxy, and you won’t have a problem believing in it.

The Bad
When I said that the combat was enjoyable, I didn’t mean it was great, just that I tolerated it in my odd way. Some parts of combat feel awkward (sniping!), and your teammates are pretty stupid. Why even bother with squad control if it doesn’t help in any way? Your teammates provide gunfire, healing and some biotic attacks, but they never rise past the level of barely adequate.

Even worse, Mass Effect “boasts” an entire galaxy to explore. Sadly, each system has maybe 3 or 4 planets that can actually be landed on. The rest are either blank (save a text description) or “scannable.” Most scans lead to the exciting discovery of different ores, gases or minerals. Wonderful.

Planetside, the average planet looks like a Brice 3D creation. No foliage, no rivers, no animals, nothing. You’ll pilot your space buggy (which is actually fun) to various locations, most of which provide you with anomalies or crashed space probes… for you to scan. From time to time, you’ll be ambushed by Geth (hive mind AI robots), giant underground worms, or space pirates, but for the most part, planets are very boring.

True, the game provides you with many side quests, mostly involving mining facilities, abandoned spacecraft, or science facilities, but each of these interiors looks the same, with only a few different enemies. Boredom eventually sets in. Finally, the inventory system could use some work. You’ll pick up a lot of weapons and items from enemies, but you do this automatically. Yes, you can break unwanted items into omni-gel (which allows you to hack items), but eventually this process will annoy you.

As I mentioned before, the graphics aren’t up to everything Mass Effect demands of them. Pretty they may be, but there are hideous (and slow) draw-ins when you enter a level. There are also elevators that take 3 to 4 minutes to get to their destination. Excuse me? Just give me a loading screen.

The Bottom Line
Mass Effect is hugely flawed. It has egregious load times, hugely boring planet exploration, and an infuriating inventory system. Yet at the same time, I have never been so invested in the outcome of a game. It also made me feel more strongly about my own decisions than any other game ever has. The characters in this game are so real (special thanks go to Keith David, who voices Captain Anderson), and your own character’s reaction to them is so believable, you won’t want to stop playing. Plus, the decisions Bioware asks you to make become meaningful and scary, quickly. Like I said before, this game gives you tough decisions, and shows you the brutal consequences of every single decision. Have fun saving the galaxy.

The Good
Many things could be said about this great game. Mass effect is the beginning of something big, a new videogame universe with many possibilities is now open, and it's just the beginning. The similarities with the Star Wars saga are clear, a Citadel with a council that rules the destiny of many worlds, different species with different culture and history really attractive to be known, political matters or special combat units trying to keep the order in the galaxy, but that's not all.

Mass Effect is something more than a videogame with some Star Wars references, it's much better than that. Mass effect is a new universe for the player, with a perfect argument that could be the script of any successfully science-fiction film. The story is deep and interesting from the beginning to its ending, and it's because you can change many things of that with your decisions. In this game was really necessary to talk a lot, explaining the main story as well as other aspects such as creatures, political matters and other things. The need to talk was the reason to make a perfect system in which you can say anything you want, with that the game is more than bearable and you don't have to watch how they talk during hours. You'll have to say what you want almost every time, and what you say will have an effect on your mission and progress. If this system would have never existed the game probably would be boring and tedious with hours of talking and the player would lost the interest on the main story.

Beside the deep story, Mass Effect is also good as a game. Gameplay is good, with a tactical group battle system which is not explosive and spectacular but it's ok. You'll need some time to know how it works and many more to know how the weapon system works, with many weapons, different kinds of ammo and other item upgrades. It's a little confusing at the beginning but when you know how to deal with it you'll have no problem.

Graphics are beautiful, every world of the main story has many details and cinematics are good too, which is something important because the whole game is like a movie. Graphics of the secondary planets are a little bit repetitive but they're ok. Facial expressions are good and that's a good point to remark because you can customize your character, with the possibility of being a female character. All the members of your crew are well done too. No matter what character you make or if you use the default one, he/she will be charismatic. We're not talking about one of those games in which the main character don't say a word (it doesn't matter if he's about to die, he won't say anything!), here, Shepard will talk with everybody as a specter and will take care of anything that you want actively. Every character has their own way to be, with different points of view and they will give you their opinion during the game. Beside that they have different skills which makes the game more tactical.

The RPG elements are obvious, it's an action game mixed with some occidental RPG elements. You will gain levels destroying your enemies and you can win some skills with that, different weapons, lots of secondary objectives and different things to do in the order that you want to do.

Sound's good, specially the voices. Voice acting is a good point of the game, and as I said it's important for a game in which talking is something priority. FX is on a par and music is epic and emotive. it's background music at the beginning and maybe you won't even notice it, but when you progress in the game it changes to much more epic and moving.

The Bad
Beside some technical bugs, we have many other things that could be much better. To start with, game duration is short, really short. If you don't want to play the side quests you'll finish the game sooner than you expected. The storyline is short and it's a game made to be played with patience and, overall, doing the secondary objects, because if you don't do that you won't enjoy the game as it should be. You can finish the game with all the secondary quests in 35 hours or so, probably 25 of them are just for secondary missions. Linking with that, secondary objectives aren't spectacular, some of them are boring and just a message will tell you what's happening, something like "with that shot you've killed the enemy, go tell your friend what you've done". We understand that we can't have a cinematic for every secondary mission but... there are many other ways to make them more attractive.

Exploring the planets is cool, the Mako is easy to use but some of them looks like the shame. It's difficult to make an amount of planets, but some of them could be even more singular. You can climb almost every mountain, but there are some planets which have lots of them, and to drive the Mako on those planets is a little irritating. Also, there are many planets and you won't be sure about which of them you've visited, and that's not a help if you're one of those players that want to see everything of a game,

Battles are good, but maybe some explosions could make them much more spectacular. Anyway it's possible that the essence of the game would change because of that, so, that's just an opinion. What's not an opinion is the fact that weapon system isn't the best ever. You'll gain many objects during your battle, and you have to stop just to see what you've taken, and you'll spent A LOT of time in your inventory administering it. You don't have to do it just for you, you have to do it for the rest of your squad, and sometimes you will rule out some items which are better than yours without knowing it. For example, you can't compare the weapon you've just taken with the weapon of a squad member which is on the Normandy because you decided not to carry him with you. A game like this need to resolve that problem.

Difficulty is strange, it's probably one of the few games that has an inverse difficulty. When you start you'll be killed a lot of times, and that's not because you don't know how to play (it could help too anyway), that's because you don't have heavy weapons or special ammo. When you've played some hours and finished some secondary missions you'll gain extra items and it's going to be really easy to kill all your enemies. You'll gain extra skills too, and it looks like the enemies has the same level all the game (which is not true at all, but that's what it looks when you're playing) and that's why the game is difficult at the beginning and easier as you progress.

The Bottom Line
Mass effect is the beginning of a important saga, which needs some improvements in some aspects and much more length on its main playable storyline, but good enough to be one of the best games in some years mixing tactical action with RPG elements. If you love science-fiction movies don't doubt about playing it, the story is attractive enough to caught you from the beginning, short but really intensive.

The Good
I'm probably the wrong person to review RPG's mainly because I'm not true to the genre. I've mostly played more of the modern releases and some D&D based one's which would include Neverwinter Nights and Rage of Mages not forgetting some JRPGs.

When I look at Mass Effect though I see a RPG made purely on being accessible. And the sales and popularity behind this game proves this, as it has attracted even people not familiar with the genre. It's hard to review this Bioware title according to Mobygame's format because where Mass Effect tends to have a good it also has a bad.

But ignoring the gameplay for a while, the graphics are fantastic. Art direction maybe a bit cliched in the Sci-Fi theme. But the visuals work very well and thanks to the Unreal Engine I'm guessing this console to PC port didn't come with much graphical bugs or surprisingly no technical issues which tend to haunt many modern RPG games.

Mass Effect lets you customize your character from the looks to the Class which the game explains and also the starting skills. You can choose a male or female character with the last name “Shepard” and what's awesome is that they're both voiced. Jennifer Hales performance as the female Shepard is solid, not forgetting the rest of the characters too; topped off with beautiful character modeling and expressions which in all adds a strong foundation to the story telling. Speaking of which the storyline is nothing too original but at least they created a whole fictional universe and lore. The game provides a codex in which you can explore and read about the universe, technology and characters. Traveling to planets has been presented well too with the galaxy map and all. And there's nothing like the feeling of having your own ship “The Normandy”.

The combat system is similar to a shooter in the veins of Gears of War or Rainbow Six: Vegas. You got the cover system and can choose 2 team mates to assist you. Leveling up your character is pretty much the usual gain XP, gain points and spend it to unlock more skills based on which class you take. From there it's your typical RPG where you have a main plot and side quests.

The Bad
The Side-quests however make the game uninteresting. This is a RPG and side-questing is an important part of them. Mostly you travel to barren planets, drive the oversensitive vehicle, investigate which is mostly that hacking mini-game which is overused like crazy! Then go rescue/shoot a few turrets/enemies. Nothing really creative although I had to chase little monkeys for some gadget it had stolen...yes I'm serious. Seems like they were lazy and only focused on the main plot. Which I will admit to some point is good, the characters are memorable but follow a usual formula, there will be the love interest, the Bi curious, the serious mature one. Saren, the main villain is forgettable, the Asari Matriarch who assists him in the start was more memorable thanks to her Asari boobs of course. If it ain't side-quest or the main plot it's console game quests like the hidden briefcases in Rainbow Six. Find all minerals, find tags oh and surveying planets is really stupid.

There is the so called “revolutionary” dialogue system which is basically the dialogue options appearing before the character finishes talking (what is that like 2 lines of code?). Most of the time your character will say something far from what you've actually selected. If you select for e.g. the option “Okay follow my orders and you will be fine” your character will end up speaking something like “Yeah keeping it real aite” or “Bush did 9/11” it actually deviates far from the chosen words.

Who am I kidding? The port is actually terrible when it has to be. The User Interface is abysmal and maintaining your inventory is a pain really.The Dialogue system could use a mouse pointer instead of the analogue-like selection. Many times I've selected the wrong dialogue as my mouse jerked a bit before I could click.

Team mates A.I is terrible and to top things off commanding them or positioning them is just as bad an idea as having rough sex with Paris Hilton without protection. Your better off just leaving them to do their own shit. This area supposedly had improvements over it's xbox brother.

The Bottom Line
Mass Effect is basically a 12-15 hours game with the remaining 20-30 hours being fillers. Not saying it's a game to avoid but going into it with no expectation is probably the only way to be satisfied with it. Or maybe playing this after Dragon Age: Origins is a bad idea (yes I did that).