My own rather lengthy review of Mass Effect.
Here we are, Mass Effect is finally upon us, Bioware??s first futuristic space faring RPG since Knights of the Old Republic. The question many of us have been wondering however without the backing or confines (depending on how you look at it) of the already established Star Wars mythos. Can Bioware??s new futuristic RPG stand on its own two feet and match up to the excellence that was Knights of the Old Republic?
I will start this off by hitting the primary focus of the game, storyline and asking you if you have ever played a Bioware made game before. If you have I will tell you right now that for most part you should already have a good idea of how the games storyline pacing generally plays. Bioware excels in Western RPGs that focus on a storyline that allows for players to make their own choices in the dialogue of what the main character says and generally acts and generally these choices will add together to decide what path your character ultimately takes at the end. Mass Effect is no different in this regard. I will not speak much on the direct storyline though I will touch on a couple of general points. It basically takes place a couple centuries from now; a galactic alliance of various species governs most of the charted sectors of our galaxy the Milky Way. We humans are relative new comers into this melting pot of alien cultures, having not all that long before discovered the technology for efficient space travel. Being the newcomer we are out to prove ourselves, though many think we are getting too much power too fast. Prejudice is quite rampant on all fronts and tensions are relatively high. Ultimately however a threat arises in the game that threatens humanity and ultimately the galaxy and the only hope falls to, you guessed it, us humanity or more specifically a human by the name of Shepard (That??s their last name as the first name, gender and general background is decided by you the player)
It may sound cliché or an overused sci-fi plot, but you shouldn't disregard it just quite yet. Bioware went out of their way with the plot of this game and breathed so much life into it. For one thing the history and lore of the game is so plentiful. You will learn so much and it's done quite gradually and much of it is optional if you don't wish to. You have a Codex in your menu which is updated through either conversations, or inspections of technology or artifacts, with information of various avenues. The codex covers different races and their culture to in-depth explanations of all the technology that you see around you. There are two main sections to this codex, Primary and Secondary. Primary section is fully narrated and contains what I would deem highly important information regarding places, races, technology that plays a vital part to the storyline and really sets up the back-story for the game and shows how things progressed to this point. While Secondary is not narrated and is more focused and detailed about a certain subjects and while it GREATLY helps understand the universe you are in secondary codex is not really vital to progress the game only for those that have the desire to learn more about the universe they are playing in.
If you are into astronomy you will be delighted to know that Bioware went out of their way and did loads of research into all the current astronomical findings. Much of the lore and information regarding any technology uses established discoveries in science to explain how things work and they really take an idea and expand upon it. It goes a VERY long ways in making this game universe believable. It makes you even contemplate if the technology you see in the game while so futuristic may actually be possible in the ways they describe it being done. Being an astronomy nut this game made me so happy. There is not "impossible light saber" jargon in this universe, it's all very believable in a more "Star Trek" sense.
The games storyline is further enhanced by the fact that all dialogue in the game, every conversation you get into and there are hundreds of conversations are all voice-overed and not in some cheesy Final Fantasy way. I mean some of if not the best voice acting you've ever encountered in gaming, you will find under the hood of this RPG. This game much like KotOR will spoil you rotten in this area, don't be too surprised to hear some familiar voice talent, common voice actors among gaming and some fairly well known Hollywood stars comprise the voice cast and do extremely good job.
Well you probably get by now that the plot and storyline aspects of the game are expertly handled but how does it play? It does alter its course quite a bit here from KotOR. You still have a party of 3, but you don't really switch between them. At all times you are in control of Shepard and the other two are basically AI controlled. However you do have limited control over them to some degree. The game on the surface plays like a shooter, with a cover system. There is no real melee combat here. No light saber duels here, sorry. It's focus is guns and bionics (being this games version of the force powers of KotOR) If you press and hold a shoulder button however the action is paused and a ring system opens up that shows your party's weapons or bionics. You can then select a weapon or biotic for that party member to switch to or use at that moment, then when you let go of the button action resumes and the characters will use the moves you selected. Any biotic move has a usage timer on it though so after you use it once, it will be several seconds before you can use it again. If you don't select anything for your teammates they will use skills on their own accord.
The game is pretty unforgiving at times I must say and you should always take every fight with caution. There is a level of randomness to it that always keeps you from certain victory. I've run into an area and completely annihilated everything with ease. But the next room which has an almost identical layout of enemies I will get slaughtered in. Some enemy weapons in the game can take you out in 1 or 2 hits so you really have watch out, and save often. This randomness wouldn't actually be a bad thing and go to help its score as it adds random difficulty spikes to the game and gaming today is too often plagued with being too easy, but this combined with the games bad auto save system really makes this more frustrating that it should be. The game auto saves for you, but it does so infrequently that if you don??t' save the game yourself and often, when you get into these difficulty spikes and die instantly from some missile or if you get unlucky and the game freezes on you (twice for me) you'll find yourself having to progress a big portion of the game over again, combat and conversations and it's becomes frustrating. To further aggravate you, when you do die, the game sorts your save by most recent time saved, but for some reason gives priority to the auto save no matter how old it is. So if you are like me and have been conditioned to automatically select the topmost save to reload you will often times be cussing out the game or yourself as you loaded the auto save from an hour ago and not the manual save you made 30 seconds ago. Other than these frustrations the combat in the game is quite fun, and more in depth than a typical shooter, but certainly not slow paced like a typical RPG. It's a different experience to be sure.
Outside of combat the game allows you to level up and put points in various areas to increase stats and unlock abilities depending on the class you picked for Shepard and your teammate??s classes. It's a good idea to plan ahead though and really have a good idea where you want to spend the points at and stick with it. I know I rather messed up my Shepard since I kept flip flopping between various skills, though he is still pretty formidable.
As with most Western RPGs the meat of the game, and what racks up the game time is not the main quest but the side stuff, the exploring and side quests. Mass Effect follows this tradition and expands upon it from KotOR. In KotOR you could basically only visit the planets which were involved with the main storyline and you did side quests within those planets, there were no other planets to go explore just for the hell of it which saddened me and made the game seem more linear than it should. Mass Effect is like the answer to KotOR??s limitation. The game is huge beyond the places you visit for storyline. You have many locations in the galaxy, many star systems to explore. Not every planet you encounter can be searched but a large majority of them can each one with its own geographical and biological makeup. Many of these random planets and moons have their own mini side quest to do on them, and they all follow a basic premise of having a few key locations to travel to and explore for debris and ruins, minerals to harvest or monsters to kill. Most of these places are not suitable for free roaming life, so are pretty barren but there is some exceptions so you may want to watch where you are driving. I felt quite bad on this one planet I landed on, I was driving my Mako, gunning for a debris point on my map and jumped off this Cliffside and beneath me a valley opened up before me and as my vehicle went down I noticed actual wildlife roaming around, just a bit too late as my Mako landed on top of a poor deer like creature, crushing it. I felt horrible. Here this deer thing is minding its own business when aliens drop from the sky and crush it...
Graphically it??s a mixed bag. Character models look absolutely outstanding. A lot of time and effort went into making the races and on top of that make each person of that race actually have uniqueness about them, so there isn??t that racist cliché of ??all of them looking alike?. Truly this game sports some of the best character models seen in gaming to date. Which definitely works well for the games atmosphere as you will be spending a large majority of the game in conversation staring at one alien face or another. Facial expressions and nuisances are incredible and lip synching while not precisely spot on is very well done. Sadly this level of detail doesn??t transfer over to the environments however, they look good don??t get me wrong but they are for the most part fairly plain and often have a ??static? feel to them when compared to some recent titles like Assassin??s Creed, Bioshock or Halo 3 the environments just don??t stand up to those games. But as I said you will probably be staring at the character models more often than not to notice much and some areas do indeed still look spectacular. Another issue that I will touch on here is the frame rate, if you played a Bioware game before you should also know what to expect here, the frame rate in this game is certainly far from perfect, it stutters around at times in places you really can??t see why it would do so and it does so quite frequently and sometimes makes you wish Bioware would have kept ironing it out for another month or two to work out kinks and hang ups like this. In light of the rest of the game however it??s forgivable. So Graphics are overall much the same feeling you got when playing KotOR, not the best out there but at times they are breathtaking.
Bioware has not only created a futuristic sci-fi RPG that stands on it??s own without an already established lore to back it up but it at the same time creates one that??s just as grand if not more so in many areas. The Mass Effect universe stands up and competes toe to toe with the likes of the Star Wars or Star Trek universe and has incredible untapped potential. Being Bioware??s creation they can take it anywhere they wish to from this point and are not limited by someone else??s lore. If you like story driven titles and you want an experience to remember you just cannot pass this game up. The few technical hang-ups aside it??s by far the best game of this current generation of titles and I will refrain from saying the best game of all time because one really needs to let the game settle with them for some time before jumping to conclusions. But anyone and everyone that games for the ??experience? owes it to themselves to play this game.
9/10
(-1 for technical issues (frame rate drops, clunky auto save) and graphically somewhat bland environments)
My own rather lengthy review of Mass Effect.
Really nice review, do you have a blog or anything where you review games? Anyway, back to them game it sounds really good from your write up, and certainly an RPG that would appeal to me. I'm actually thinking of ordering it as I'm writing this.
My own rather lengthy review of Mass Effect.
Cool review, I only skimmed over it for now I will come back and read it in its entirety. I hear this is one for the xbox360 that every person should have in thier collection of RPGs
