Mass Effect is the latest RPG offering from Bioware. It sets you in the future where humanity is struggling to find its place among the other species in the galaxy. Meanwhile, Saren, a rogue agent of an above-the-law galactic police force known as the Spectres, threatens to unleash a genocide on the galaxy. You play as Commander Shepherd, the first human to be accepted into the ranks of the Spectres, and through a set of events you have made it your personal quest to stop Saren.
Mass Effect has a very in-depth character creation utility for this game. You can modify almost every aspect of your character’s facial appearance allowing you to make a dashing hero or someone more akin to the characters from “Deliverance.” You also have the option of deciding your character’s class in combat. If you prefer guns and up-close combat over biotics (Mass Effect’s version of the Force) then you will have training with each of the available weapon types. Or you can focus on biotics and have no training with weapons. Now this doesn’t mean you can’t use weapons, you just won’t be able to upgrade your skills with them or use the scopes on weapons that have them. You can also have your combat focus be on technology, which will give you an advantage over robotic adversaries and allow you to upgrade your computer hacking and decryption skills. Or you can divert your focus into any two of the options, however by doing this you sacrifice the most advanced skills of your chosen focal areas. This allows for great diversity in how you play the game and how your character advances in combat skills.
Bioware has created a very interesting visual library of locations and alien races that will make you think that you’ve walked into an unexplored section of the Star Wars universe. There are several alien species, each with its own history and cultural mythology. There is much to learn on these races that Bioware has painstakingly written. Many of the planets that you can explore, and even ones that you cannot, even have brief histories written about them. Bioware went the extra mile in making a very convincing fictional world.
The gameplay combines RPG elements with 3rd person shooter elements. For each mission you get to choose two characters to be a part of your team. Each of the characters is a different class so you’ve got to decide how to balance their strengths and weaknesses with your own. In combat you can give commands to your teammates to take cover, go on the offensive, etc. (though I never used these commands). You also have the option to micro-manage your teammates use of powers in combat if you wish. However I found that it was just as easy to let them act on their own while I did all the hard work.
Depending on your chosen class, you’ll have options outside of your guns to fight enemies. These are the biotic and tech powers. Each has its own “cooldown” timer so you aren’t able to just run around using “Throw” on each enemy. You’re going to have to balance your guns with these skills. This leads to very interesting combat scenarios. Especially when you factor in the variety of teammate combinations, each battle can play out very differently. The down side to the combat is that it always seemed as if my teammates were not pulling their own weight. They would give minor help, but not enough for me to notice they were there.
During its development, much was made about its revolutionary system for communicating with NPCs. Like previous Bioware games such as the Knights of the Old Republic series, how you chose to respond to other characters and situations would determine how “good” or “evil” you were (or in Mass Effect’s case, Paragon and Renegade). Whereas most RPGs have you choosing responses from a list, Mass Effect gives you a wheel with all of the possible options. You use the control stick to highlight the option you want to choose while the dialogue is being spoken. While the option of choosing how your character responds is very refreshing, it hardly seems innovative. The most innovative parts, however, are the situations where you must make gut-wrenching decisions that come down to life or death situations for many characters in the game. Mass Effect is one of the few games that have ever made choice-making difficult by presenting severe consequences based my decisions.
There are many things to do in Mass Effect. From gambling, to side quests, to romancing. The list of planetary systems that you can explore is long. Each system has at least one planet of which you can explore a small part. Though there is a very long list of side quests to complete, the primary missions are very short. If you focus solely on these missions, you’ll find yourself finishing this game much quicker than expected. The side quests are interesting enough to keep you occupied. They’ll have you going to almost every explorable planet in the game. However, as you complete more side quests, you’ll notice that each of them feels strangely familiar. This is because each side quest recycles the structures that the quests take place in. You’ll eventually be able to look at the outside of the structure and know exactly what the interior looks like, aside from the placement of crates and other objects. Whether this was done because the game was rushed to finish or Bioware just got lazy, I don’t know. But it is a very annoying repetition that seems to say to the player, “We know you’ve seen this building before, but we really don’t care.”
For the most part, the graphics of Mass Effect are among some of the best around in current games. The problem is that during many of the cutscenes and conversations, there is an extremely large amount of texture pop-in. This happens on both the environment geometry and character models. This becomes a very distracting element that one would expect in a PC game being played on a computer that is not quite up to snuff. However, on a console game this is simply unacceptable.
As a concept, Mass Effect sounds like a great game. There is a variety of combat, the game adapts to your choices, and the story is entertaining. However, as a finished product, Mass Effect stumbles. The graphics suffer from severe problems and the story is painfully short. It almost seems as if Bioware was trying to make a teaser game in order to get an audience hooked for when Mass Effect’s planned sequel is released. Mass Effect is not a bad game. The combat is fun and from what I hear the higher difficulty levels are quite challenging. However, for me that’s just not enough to get past its flaws.
Score: 3 out of 5
