Sorry for the break, I’ve been rather busy with a lot of things in RL.. But I’ve come back to do Mass Effect!
Mass Effect was a really long awaited game for me, I really enjoyed the KoToR series (yes, both of them even though The Sith Lord’s story was a little lacking I still enjoyed the game) and couldn’t wait to see what bioware would do with this.
I’d describe the game as a weird cross between KoToR and Gears of War, such that it’s a third person shooter almost to the exact same degree as Gears with a few differences such as the cover system. That particular system works a lot better in GoW than in Mass Effect because it seems more responsive and generally ‘smarter’ in Gears where the cover button is the button ‘A’, whereas if I recall correctly (I hardly ever use the cover function in Mass Effect because of how bad it is) it’s a thumbstick click.
Mass Effect does however add a whole bunch of additional gameplay mechanics that are very RPG-esque, true to Bioware’s image. Leveling your character and party up, and using special abilities to increase individual characters or your entire party to gain an advantage against multiple enemies is what sets it apart from a game like Gears of War…
There aren’t as many abilities as there was in KoToR, which is a little dissappointing. But if there were as many it would make the game a lot more complicated and less casual gamer-friendly and more like a DnD game than Bioware may have intended. However, the DnDness of KoToR is very well the likely reason a lot of people enjoyed it to the degree they did and as such I think it was a mistake for Bioware to alter their method of game creating. I’m in no means upset by the way this game turned out, I’ve played it through at least 4 times, and enjoyed each time immensely and I’m happy they’re not sticking to a single type of game, but I believe if the game was more like DnD than it is, it could have come out to be a better game.
However, having more DnD in it would also be tough because it would begin to negate the novelty of the third-person shooter part. Since in DnD you have a chance-to-hit, you would begin negating the players ability to aim their weapon if you incorporated this, and of course when you alter one aspect of DnD many other things need to be changed to make sure it stays balanced. And speaking of balance, one of my largest beefs with the game is that it’s completely opposite to Oblivion’s default level to creature difficulty ratio. And for those who don’t know about that, when you level up in Oblivion monsters start to become impossible to defeat and I mean impossible (Mods have been made to counteract this, but back when they didn’t exist it was horrific). In turn, when you get to around level 30 (out of 60 max) MoB’s become outrageously easy to take down, even without a party.
Which brings me to the next topic, the party. Unlike KoToR you do not have the ability to take direct control of the 3 characters in your party, but rather you always directly control the protagonist Mr/Ms Shepherd and indirectly control your party members, as a commander would. Ie: Move there! Shoot There! Use X ability on Y enemy! etc. And they’re rather terrible at it also. They have some party settings which influence their AI’s ability to judge whether to use an ability or not, and its simply just best to leave it on the setting which says for them to use it up as soon as the battle starts. Especially since in the later levels you’ll hardly even need them, but its always nice to have free shots while enemies are floating happily around a room in an inspired ragdoll motion. If they at least attempted moving or firing back (a la Psi-Ops) it would make it that much more realistic, and maybe a little harder?
And with regard to abilities, I don’t like the way they implemented an anti-spam tactic. It penalizes Biotics (Mages for you DnD folk) so much, since their weapon specialization is non-existant they need to wait behind cover while their abilities recharge before doing anything again. And I’m not talking about a 2-3 second recharge, some abilities have 90 seconds to wait! Staple offensive abilities are at least 20-30 seconds wait, and that just isn’t acceptable in a combat situation. Despite how long some of the disabling abilities may last the recharge times on the abilities need to be rebalanced, even if solely for the biotic class since it’s pretty much the only way for them to hurt something. Also, like KoToR you have the ability to be good or evil depending on your speech and actions, however… Unlike KoToR this doesn’t affect your abilities at all, in face besides what you do in the game it doesn’t affect anything besides maybe a little bit how you look. There are multiple endings available for good and bad but it’s brought up by a final decision that isn’t swayed by the rest of the game, so you can live your entire life as the universes nicest angel and then take the evil ending and vice versa. And I do wish that in Mass Effect 2 they add more changes to how the game is played depending on how evil/good you are.
The story is mediocre to good, I won’t go into too much detail because I do my best not to spoil a game in these reviews. But I usually prefer a twist that involves the protagonist in some way rather than just the antagonist, ( ie: Luke I am your father! ) and even though the story was really well written and made into the game in a flawless manor, it’s just a personal preference of mine to have a twist that changes how you feel about the character you’re playing, rather than the character you’re fighting against. And I prefer it even moreso when they make you want to hunt the antagonist even more out of hate or anger rather than feeling sympathy for them.
Onto the game detail: Graphics are amazing, but I find that having the “Movie Grain” on can be a little annoying at times, but without can give way to seeing some bad anti-aliasing issues. Sound is mediocre, there was nothing impressive about it since most Sci-Fi noises have already been done before, and done well. The noises were done well, but again nothing impressive. And the voice acting was better than mediocre but not great. Hearing and recognizing Seth Green right at the beginning was probably the highlight of the voices.
