Mass Effect

With much thanks to Catnipped, I was able to get Mass Effect free of charge on the first day of release. I am about 30 hours into the game and so far, it has definitely been a very positive experience. Bioware is really great at telling a grand story. Here are my thoughts:

Things I liked:
The graphics are very good. While I am not sure why they couldn’t do some kind of caching on the HD as having to load textures on the fly generates some annoying pauses in the action, when everything is in, the game looks gorgeous. You can see the facial expressions of the NPCs and the battles feel very frantic with bullets whizzing by your head as you desperately look for cover.

The voice acting is superb. All the intonations sound right and the facial expressions usually match the mood of the discussion as well. No blank stares as the fate of the world hangs in the balance. The conversations add a lot of depth to the game and I actually look forward to finding the next NPC just to see what they have to say.

The storyline has always been a strong point of most Bioware games, and this one is no exception. It really makes the player want to keep going just to see where the next plot twist will be and what other new information will be revealed.

The Combat system borrows heavily from Gears of War. Cover is the name of the game here as most enemies are pretty good shots and enemy snipers often times will 1 shot you if you are out in the open. The biotics (magic) of the game is weaved very well into the flow of combat.

Each pitched battle can also happen in many ways depending on what class you are. I decided to play as an Engineer my first time through so in most of the combat missions, I rely on grenades and my other squad mates to do most of the damage while I hide in the back disabling enemy weapons with sabotage and healing my party.

The achievements actually mean something! While all Xbox games have achievements, most of the time, they are merely trophies you hang on your gamer card wall to increase your own E-peen. The achievements in Mass Effect actually have an effect on the game. Unlock the rifle expert achievement, and you can add the rifle talent to your starting character your next time through, regardless of class. Rack up a million credits and you gain access to special weapons and armor only available to Spectres. Heal your party 150 times and you can add First Aid talent to your next character. I think nearly every achievement unlocks something else you can use in a new game

The game also comes in 4 difficulty modes, with Insanity being unlocked once you have beaten the game once. There is also a new game+ mode. All of the above make for an immense amount of replay value. After completing this first playthrough, I seriously think I will play through the game again on the insanity mode with a female character just to hear the dialogue from the other side.

Things I didn’t like:
Bad case of Consolelitis. The inventory management system is pretty lame. It’s essentially a huge long badly sorted list that you have to scroll through. It organizes the items by their item level which is represented by a Roman numeral (so a banshee rifle VI is more powerful than a banshee rifle IV). This isn’t so bad if you are trying to breakdown stuff into omnigel since you can go to the equip screen which auto sorts the items by type as well, but it’s absolutely horrible when you try to sell stuff since it’s just one giant list in the sell window. So if you find out that you happened to have a higher level of an assault rifle and wanted to sell the lower level one, you have to scroll all the way to those items of the same level, often times, this can mean scrolling through 20 or more items, 1 at a time. Add this to the fact that there is a 150 item limit and it just compounds the problem.

The hotkeys are also very annoying as you can only have 1 hotkey mapped to a skill and only your main character gets this hotkey. To issue commands to squad members to use their powers requires you to pause the game and bring up the powers menu then activate. The pauses can lead to some serious breakages of action in a firefight and take away from the overall effect. I am pretty sure this game will eventually be ported to a PC and that should fix most of these interface issues.

Mass Effect really doesn’t give a very good explanation about how to effectively play the game. The manual offers some basic information, but it basically tosses you into the water and expects you to swim. You don't really know the ranges of the weapons and how to take cover, plus the enemies start out WAY higher than your characters do when you first start out and leads to a lot of difficult battles at the beginning. As your equipment and levels start to catch up, it gets much better.

The AI can use a little work. While your squad mates generally do a good job of adhering to your commands and finding cover, sometimes, they make inexplicably retarded decisions like running out into the open to reach a piece of cover that’s just around the corner but out of LoS.

As mentioned before, there is no caching in this game and so everything needs to be loaded on the fly from the DVD. This leads to some annoying load times between zones and I assume leads to why they didn’t include a minimap in the UI. The lack of a minimap usually isn’t a problem though as the zones aren’t too convoluted and simply traversing a path a couple of times will commit it to memory. When you are just totally lost, you can always open up the main large scale map from the menu (very detailed and helpful).