Mass Effect (XBOX 360)

I’m late to the party, with Mass Effect 2 coming out in just a few days. I’m not traditionally a big role-playing guy, though I did play Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion for the 360, and ended up enjoying parts of it. I also enjoyed Knights of the Old Republic on the original XBOX, also by Mass Effect developer Bioware. Mass Effect 2 allows you to import characters from the first game, so I thought it important to give the first game a shot. Because RPGs, by nature, are so large, it’s difficult to judge this game as one experience, so I’ll instead break it into parts.

Graphics:
The game looks great, once everything loads. The textures are amazing in some parts (particularly your alien teammate, Wrex), and adequate at the very least, everywhere else. There is notable texture pop-in, though, throughout the entire game. Each time a new environment or cut-scene is loaded, you’ll see the textures pop-in in phases. Also, framerate suffers from time to time. At first, I was very impressed with the artistic design of the environments, which is mostly a clean future, opposite than that of movies like Alien and Blade Runner. As you get several hours in, you’ll see that technology doesn’t vary enough from planet to planet. It’s as if every building in the entire galaxy has the same interior decorator, and even worse, aside from major sections for plot development, there are only a few floorplans in use. This helps break the illusion that you’re truly exploring the vastness of space, but for a game with so much stuff in it, it’s a technical requirement, and one that I can forgive.

Sound/Dialogue:
The music in this game is great. Really great. It helps create an authentic atmosphere that feels like classic Sci-Fi. The voice acting is also top notch. There is a lot of dialogue in a story this big, and all of the major players are well acted. The small, bit parts are also pretty decent. The dialogue trees don’t always have the impact that you might think. Making different choices doesn’t always change up the conversation, leading you believe that your decisions on what to say have impact when they don’t.

Control/Game Management:
It’s a good thing that I finished this game, because if I wrote this review prior to about 5 hours into the game, it’d be filled with a whole slew of expletives. The worst thing about Mass Effect is that it doesn’t teach new players what is going on. You’re thrown into the mix, on your own. There are a ton of weapons, upgrades, biotics (whatever the hell that means), and attributes that you’ve collected on the way, with little to no understanding of what they are, how they work, or when they should be used. You’re able to brute-force your way through the first part of the game, not really understanding, which is a detriment, because when you come to your first boss, she kicks your ass in a manner that I’m not even comfortable discussing. Death, for me, came LITERALLY within 5 seconds of starting the battle. Not only was I dying at record speed, but without understanding what I was doing wrong or what I should be doing to improve. The game leads you to believe that you can play it like a traditional shooter, but you cannot, with any success. To be even remotely proficient, you will need to carefully equip yourself, pausing, strategizing, and organizing your spells mid-battle. Once you understand this complicated system, things will work fine. In order to figure out how all that stuff worked, I had to get killed about 30 times. Looking online and talking with the apostles who’ve also played this game, I was not alone. In addition to the sections on foot, there are many vehicle sections. At first, they seem like a fun way to break up the action, but they become tedious, the physics are strange (not in a varying gravity “good way”), and the missiles on your craft don’t always shoot like they’re supposed to, not aiming correctly on the Y axis.

Presentation/Features:
Travel in Mass Effect is done on a universe map that lets you fly to planets separated by star systems. It looks cool, but is sometimes confusing since everything looks the same. You can’t tell if you’ve been somewhere, unless you re-land on the planet and look. With everything being a similarly sized sphere, it’s tough to remember. Your quests are separated and organized neatly and clearly. Not all of your quests are still available after you trigger certain events, which led to me completing the game, with not even enough quests active to get achievements, and without the ability to go back. While not a flaw, it’s a design decision that didn’t sit well with me. There were entire worlds I didn’t even get the opportunity to see. Much of the information about the Mass Effect universe is given to you through well voice-acted codex entries. However, I had no interest in pausing the game to listen to people talk about it. I would preferred that this info be given some other way, perhaps while I walked or drove from place to place. There certainly was enough down-time. Lastly in this area, and most troublesome, is a completely useless quick-save system. It’s useless in that it doesn’t quick-save, except for after the most major of events. I found this out the hard way by having to go back an hour and replay huge sections, because there was a “gotcha” kill. Horrible. …and resulted in me saving like I was playing a 90s era PC shooter, from room to room. By the time I completed the game, I had over 130 individual manual saves.

Story/Characters:
Plotwise, the story is so-so. It pretty much rips off Star Wars. You play a Spectre, which is essentially a Jedi, overseeing the galactic senate. You are off chasing a guy who’s going to destroy the universe if not put in check. …nothing groundbreaking, but nothing bad. What is great is your interaction with your own crew. It got a lot of sensationalized press at the time for its sex-scene, but the relationships that you can build with your team is one of the best things about the game. They feel earned.

Overall:
I hated this game at first. I found it borderline unplayable and disgustingly frustrating. The game doesn’t help you along, like it should, and AAA games do. Once I got everything figured out, though, I found it incredibly enjoyable. I do have gripes, which make me all the more excited for Mass Effect 2, since I believe that the game can be improved in just about every way. The good, if you can make yourself get there, far outweighs the bad, and Mass Effect is a great, great experience once you get your space legs.