The most challenging aspect of Mass Effect is deciding whether you actually like it or not. At first you don’t, and ten hours later you’re still not too fond of it, yet you’re still playing. This is exactly what happened to me. I wanted to quit after a few hours into the game, but despite the countless technical flaws, quirky controls, and generic weapons; there was enough excitement to keep playing through until the end, both story and game play wise. I’m sure you remember the super exciting Knights of the Old Republic games that came out on Xbox and PC a few years back. Bioware was the developer of those successful games, and they are also the developer for this first in a trilogy space opus.
In a genre long dominated by sci-fi giants Star Wars and Star Trek, Bioware set out to create a new and exciting adventure throughout the galaxy. You start out as Commander Shepherd, the last surviving human soldier in his outfit. Not much is known about him as you’re just kind of thrown into the story, though there are various codex (journal) entries placed throughout the game that help give some information on the back story. You begin Mass Effect on a mission to investigate a mysterious beacon that belonged to an ancient extinct species. In popular fashion, things start to happen, and your primary target becomes Saren who is a Spectre, which is the Council’s version of a Jedi from Star Wars. Saren’s searching for a mysterious weapon that in the wrong hands could wreck complete havoc across the universe. It’s up to you to convince the Council that he’s gone rogue and that the fate of every race across the universe is in danger.
It takes a couple of hours to really get into the story, but beyond that it’s exciting and addicting. While Mass Effect is the first of a tentative trilogy, it’s over way too fast. Fortunately though the main allure of storytelling in Mass Effect has many branches based off the dialogue you choose. There is a LOT of content to pay attention to, and you can either be a complete d*ck in what you say and do and acquire renegade points or choose reasoning dialogue to prevent as much violence as possible and be the hero of the galaxy. Whichever you choose, there’s enough of a variety in dialogue and moral choices to warrant more than one play through. Even in the main storyline, you’re presented with points of interest on different planets spread throughout multiple galaxy systems and you’re free to check them out in any order you wish. Initially Mass Effect feels huge. There are multiple galaxies with multiple star systems and planets that you can bring information up on, but there are only a handful you can actually land on for side quests outside of the main storyline planets. That’s not to say that the scope of the game in general isn’t in a sense “epic,” it’s just a little misleading and will put many scope RPG gamers’ pants in a twist.
Mass Effect is a straight up action role-playing game. There are only four weapons in the game which are your basic four like the Assault Rifle, Pistol, Sniper Rifle, and Shotgun. You’ve also got Biotics like “Throw” that act as the magic attacks in the game. You won’t meet many characters throughout the game, but it’s always you and two other people that you choose to be in your party fighting. Each character has a set of stats that you level up after earning enough experience, but you’re only allowed two points per level to distribute among your stats so you’ll often times run into dilemmas like “do I want better accuracy with my Assault rifle or more health?” Unlike traditional shooters where you’re more likely to conserve ammo to use in bigger fire fights, there is no ammo in Mass Effect. The weapons are really just blasters, but they overheat easily and as far as the Assault Rifle’s concerned, shots will go everywhere around your target and never AT your target unless you upgrade those weapons’ stats. I’ve always been partial to sniper rifles in shooter games (my fingers get temporary tourettes in close-combat skirmishes), but the skill level to use one effectively in Mass Effect was challenging, yet satisfying. Even with a majority of my sniper skills maxed out, when I zoomed in the scope would still rotate quite a bit (unfortunately there’s no holding your breath like in Call of Duty).
It takes quite a while to get use to the combat system and even on normal difficulty you can easily become overwhelmed by enemy fire. The game even uses a weak cover system, though controlling your movements is a difficulty in itself, which brings me to the biggest issue with the game. The targeting system is horrid. By the time you’ve locked on to what you’re shooting at you’ve probably already lost half of your life being shot by other enemies around you. Other times it will lock and then jerk down to something else that’s targetable. Biotics become very useful in the latter half of the game but still pale in comparison to the kind of damage you can deal with the assault and sniper rifle alone. There are a good amount of weapon upgrades like +25% damage against organic enemies, as well as ammo upgrades that can be found in various lockers throughout the game. In order to open these lockers you have to hack them by timing sequential button pushes, and the more difficult the locks are the higher hacking ability one of your characters has to have. You can easily finish the game without having any kind of hacking skills, though some of the higher tiered weapons are probably found in these more difficult lockers.
Now for my love/hate relationship with Mass Effect: there are so many bugs and technical issues that while most of the time don’t affect game play, they occur all too often to be in this generation of game design. Despite most planets having the same general design save for a few near the end, Mass Effect has some spectacular visuals. Textures are slow to load in and character models look like they were made by an artist at a wax museum, but overall appealing. Then there’s the frame rate. Not that you want to run in and run amok like you’re Duke Nukem, but if any kind of action involving multiple explosions and or enemies are in too close proximity of each other the game slows down to a painful sluggish slideshow. Considering the hefty amount of spoken dialogue, the voice-overs weren’t too bad and Seth Green even had a cameo as your pilot Joker. The vacuum of silence in space is enough to make a person go crazy but thankfully the dark and ominous background music breaks the silence. Also the sound effects are pretty standard as far as action shooters go with explosions, blaster fire, and the numerous times I drop the f-bomb.
Overall Mass Effect isn’t by any means a bad game. The game play starts getting fun after you get deeper into the game and the story gets even better, but there are a lot of things that can be improved on for Mass Effect 2. While it’s primarily a shooter with secondary RPG standards, Mass Effect is probably the best shooter/RPG hybrid out there right now and even with all that’s bad about this game I’ll still be checking out ME2 whenever it drops.
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