Mass Effect

System: PC
Release Date: 2008
Published By: EA
Reviewed by: Darien
Rating:

Mass Effect would be an easy 4 or maybe 4.5 if it weren't for the stupid dune buggy.

You start the game with a nice heroic introduction to the funky space opera, and then it plops you on a besieged planet, and you fight your way across the surface to find the "beacon." Then you head to the Citadel, which is the centre of galactic civilisation, and try to convince the council that there's a real threat here. While you're on the Citadel, you can do a whole bunch of side-quest stuff where you help people with various tasks, and all the while you're trying to solve a mystery and play politics with the council. It's really fun. Then you get off the Citadel, and, wow! There's a whole galaxy out there to explore! This game delivers.

And then you find out that every single planet in the entire galaxy is a featureless bumpy rubber ball that you drive a dune buggy around on.

Mass Effect is basically a tactical shooter with RPG elements. You control a squad of three characters, and you shoot your way through a variety of missions against the Geth, who are basically just the Necrons with a fresh coat of paint. Along the way, you meet a variety of characters of many alien races, navigate through a lot of pretty interesting dialogue sequences, solve all the problems in the whole galaxy, and oh lordy do you do a lot of stupid dune buggy levels.

The main game is actually fairly short. Counting the Citadel as a planet, it's possible to beat the game setting foot on no more than seven planets, of (I'm guessing here) six hundred thousand planets the game contains. Those seven are the interesting ones, where there's stuff to do. On those seven planets, you'll go through large, interesting areas with a bunch of different encounters in them. You'll also interact with many and varied friendly NPCs, cope with interesting plot twists, and solve meaningful -- and fun! -- mysteries. On the other planets you drive the dune buggy around and pick up iron ore.

Yeah, it really is as bad as I make it sound. The dune buggy controls do pretty much what you'd expect them to do on a basic level, so you might think, hey, at least it's relatively straightforward, if not exactly compelling gameplay. Only the physics, well, they are not everything they could be. It is very difficult to move the buggy at all without starting to bounce all over the place, caroming off of tiny little cuts in the terrain and suddenly going the wrong way because you hit something that flipped you around entirely. It's also really hard to aim at things using the dune buggy, and you better believe there's combat to do. I mean, there's a big targeting reticle on the screen, so you'd think it would be fairly easy, but the gun seems to point all kinds of places except the centre of that red rectangle. Most of the time, I didn't even bother trying to shoot at foot soldiers; I just ran them the fuck over, because it was a lot less difficult. Every single side-quest out in the galaxy involves a dune buggy planet, too; you land, pin the important locations on your map, and drive off over the totally featureless plains until you get to them. Then you shoot your way through the exact same three-room bunker that's on every single planet and then you leave. But I promise: the main game is actually really fun. You see how you can get whiplash playing this game?

It's not all sunshine and roses aside from the dune buggy, though. The inventory is amazingly bad. Dig this. First, you have a hard cap of 150 items. Period (it is possible to raise this via HAX, but it's otherwise unchangable). At 135 items, the game starts popping up nag bubbles complaining about how full your inventory is. Once your inventory is full, you can no longer pick up any new items -- all you can do is melt them into "omni-gel," which is used for cheating at Frogger. In the late-game, tons and tons of items get dumped into your inventory almost non-stop, so you end up spending annoyingly large amounts of time clearing it out. And the items themselves? Scientifically designed by aliens from the future to be as indistinct and boring as possible. They're all called shit like Striker I and Striker II and Striker VI. Yeah, that's right; it's just new permutations of the exact same items.

Combat is fun, but it'll take some time to get used to; whatever you're expecting it to play like, well, it doesn't. You get four different guns -- pistol, shotgun, assault rifle, and sniper rifle -- and you can switch among them at any time. There is no stupid ammunition to worry about; your firing capacity is limited instead by a vastly more fun "heat" mechanic. As you fire, your weapon builds up heat, and heat dissipates when you aren't firing. If your heat gauge fills, your weapon overheats, and can't be fired for a few seconds. It's simple, it's elegant, and there are no goddamn vendor-stock bullets you need to make sure you top off every time you go back to town. And you never find yourself out of ammo at a really annoying time. You also get a few magic powers of various sorts; maybe you can stun mobs, or make their weapons overheat, or whatnot, all depending on your class. These powers are cooldown-limited and generally very useful.

The dialogue bits are fun and engaging, with a lot of interaction to keep the pace up, and a storyline that isn't completely hackneyed and obvious. The crew actually isn't all identical in this game; some of them give you quests, some don't, and a few of them can be romanced. You only get one sex scene per playthrough, but they're very well done, and, on a whole, the crew interaction and romance angles are well-implemented and engaging. Talking to non-crew NPCs is also interesting, and the game makes it fairly easy to understand what you're saying at any given juncture via the "conversation wheel" metaphor, which puts negative responses at the bottom of the wheel and positive responses at the top. This is a whole lot more usable than just an unsorted list of context-free responses and you just try to guess which ones will be sarcastic or aggressive.

Graphically, the game is outstanding, with truly exceptional character models and skins. The alien species are diverse and interesting, with some that are more human-like and some that are distinctly other. The animation is also very carefully done, with particular emphasis on the faces -- very important in a talky-man game like this. The environments on the major planets are highly varied, but they all look excellent -- Ilos in particular really wowed me. The minor planets, unfortunately, are all featureless and boring. Special effects look like exactly what you're expecting from a space opera game; over-the-top visible-laser-beam stuff, explosions in space, streaky-star warp effects, the whole works. And there are, of course, sounds in space, because, hey, it doesn't seem right without them. Even though it... is.

The voice acting is good. Not perfect, but good. No characters in particular stick out in my mind as badly-voiced in any meaningful way, and there are no weird distracting accents. The music is excellent, and fits the mood of the game very well, and the sound effects are fine; ambient soundscape isn't a particular strength here, however.

Mass Effect, overall, is worth a play for pretty much anybody. You don't technically have to do all those stupid dune buggy levels, and the rest of the game's a lot of fun. It's a good old-fashioned over-the-top heroic space opera, and it knows it, and it's not ashamed; if you're expecting anything too deep, this isn't it, but if you want to shoot up some damn aliens and save the galaxy, well, hell, this should fit the bill.

Buy this game from Amazon.com!