Mass Effect Review

This game is without a doubt the next generation of interactive storytelling. Mass Effect is a science-fiction RPG from Bioware. You play as Commander Shepard in the 22nd century, a time when the human race has made contact with other species. Your goal is to stop an alien named Sarin and his army of Artificial Intelligent robots from taking over the galaxy. That's it. I'm not going to say anymore about the story. That is because the story, or should I say storytelling, is the beauty of the game. Think of this as a movie but with the detail and depth of a book.

The first thing you have to do is to create your protagonist. You can chose to use a pre-made character or to create one yourself. If you choose to create your own character, you first choose whether you want to be male or female. And then you are presented with a choice of your background, whether you're a War-Hero, Earth born or lived on space stations all your life. This will actually affect the dialogue in the game and how other characters approach you. You then get to alter your face. You can make your character quite good looking but you can also make their face look like it had fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. The number of hairstyle choices available may disappoint a few people. For example, you can't have a big afro but this is understandable as your main character is in the military and only military style haircuts are available. In fact, I'm glad they did this as a character walking around with a huge afro would probably ruin the atmosphere for me. Finally, you get to choose one of the six classes which determines what role you will play in combat scenarios.

Depending how you play the game, you will probably spend roughly about a third of your time enjoying cutscenes, a third in combat and the final third of your time exploring and doing quests.

Overall, the storyline is good. The storyline is nothing special though. But where the game really excels, as I mentioned earlier, is how it tells this story. It's how you, the player, can develop your character through the story. There are a lot of conversations in this game. When you're talking to another character, a "response wheel" will pop up for you to choose your response. There are normally three options. One is the Paragon choice where your character will give a polite, caring or considerate response. Another is the Renegade response where your character will be a hard-ass, impolite and couldn't care about anyone else as long as he/she gets his/her job done. Finally there is a neutral response. It is these choices which bring the depth into the storyline and character development, not to mention the replayability you can get from the game. With all these choices and I am truly amazed at how much dialogue must have been recorded for this game. The voice acting is top-notch. The cutscenes, especially the ones towards the end are truly cinematic and really adds to the atmosphere and excitement.

Apart from the main storyline, there are extra missions available for you to do. These normally require you to land on an uncharted planet and kill a few bad guys. Occasionally, there are multiple endings to these missions depending on if you want to play as a Paragon or a Renegade. Exploring the planet is interesting the first few times but after that, you get bored of driving your vehicle up mountains over and over again. These planets are amazingly plain and pointless. Ok, you get to collect a few hidden items dotted around the planet but ultimately, that is it. Nothing else is there. I actually got fed up of driving around planets and decided to skip it and carried on with the main storyline.

The combat system, at first, is difficult to get the hang of. The tutorials are crap. You're best off reading the manual. There is a cover system but it is ineffective when half of the enemy runs at you. As an infrequent player of RPGs who plays a lot of shooters, I died a lot initially. That is until I realised that I needed better armour for my character. After learning about better armour and how to use the biotic and tech powers effectively, combat becomes more fun and more tactical even though the AI is bad. I must stress that this is an RPG and not a shooter. And as I result, I won't the AI affect my final score too much. However, comparing to other shooters, the AI is slightly below average and the extra mission level design (not the storyline levels as they are pretty good) is just appalling. I just hope they work on these for Mass Effect 2.

The biggest problem I had with the game is the save points. They are almost non-existant. If you get this game, I recommend you save everytime you finish a cutscene and just before you go into a fight. It's frustrating to die in combat to find out you have to redo 30 min of gameplay. There are also some horrible framerate problems. This game tends to load things on the fly so that you rarely get loading screens and when you do, they are nice and short. The downside to this is that you get texture pop-ins. The game will load a low-res texture first and ten seconds down the line, your character transforms their clothing from something blurry to something very crisp and sharp. I know this has frustrated a lot of people in the gaming community but I found it acceptable if it shortens load times. What really annoys me though is that it happens in cutscenes! Finally, I found myself towards the end of the game having too much money. I actually hit the upper limit of 9,999,999 credits. Items I picked up during quests became worthless. Another reason I gave up exploration towards the end of the game.

Conclusion
The storyline, character development and voice acting is superb. The combat system could be better. The side-quest levels need a better layout to suit the combat system. Character Creation system is pretty good. Save-points are infrequent but overall, the game is truly an amazing experience. I would still say this is a must buy game as you won't get this kind of experience from any other game. Clocking over 35 hours of gameplay for most people (I clocked 47 hours!), you can't go wrong.

8.8/10