The bar has been raised.
Mass Effect is a spectacular RPG/Shooter hybrid, with emphasis on the RPG, but no lack of quality in the shooting.
The plot is absolutely incredible. The graphics are stunning, the audio is simply amazing. The action is intense, dialog acted out brilliantly. The game is, as a whole, resplendent, a shining star in a vast sea of gaming, the large and, until the last few months, somewhat bleak expanse of the next generation.
Sure, it wobbles a bit, and there’s a flare or two which threatens to reach out and lick a planet, to extend this metaphor, but it never causes more damage than a bit of lost cell phone reception.
The basics of Mass Effect are that you’re a human, working for humanity’s interests in a hostile galaxy. Humanity’s first interaction with the galaxy’s other inhabitants of note was hostile, and a scant few decades later, nobody has forgotten what happened. Fortunately, you have a chance to change things by becoming one of the most powerful law enforcement officers in the galaxy, joining the most prestigious inter-species spec-ops unit in the galaxy, the Spectres. Spectres answer to nobody but the Council, the group essentially in charge of the galaxy. They’re given permission to do whatever it takes to accomplish a mission, and training to match.
Of course, this is a Bioware game, so things are going to get big, and players will need that training, in any class they choose of the 6. 3 primary classes are available, focused on combat, engineering, or biotics(read:psionic magic). Hybrid classes are available as well. All are good choices, though the primary combat class is by far the easiest to play the first time around, and it’s very satisfying. When things get bad, and an army of synthetic beings decides to start killing everything, and a rogue Spectre with the single most powerful ship in the universe wants to kill you, the ability to blast away at anything is very welcome. Sure, you have a nice spaceship and a troop carrier with a cannon, but the odds are certainly against you.
It’s hard to pin down what makes the game so special, as it’s certainly not without flaws. Textures load on top of each other prominently, meaning players see lots of low-res in conversations suddenly replaced with beautiful high-res ones. I have nothing against hi-res texture and in fact, encourage it, but the pop-in gets distracting, especially since it tends to happen during dialog and cutscenes.
Combat a bit uneven; often it’s stunningly easy, or controller-smashingly hard in a few sections, often right after a cutscene. Combined with the very sparse autosave, it can lead to some frustration for players who don’t save enough.
And as everyone knows by now, the menus are terrible. Can’t sort things, and in the buy/sell menu, you get stuck scrolling, one at a time, through 150 fucking items. I don’t know why the truly great radial menus for dialog and combat didn’t present themselves, somehow, in the rest of the game.
Allied AI has its problems as well. Pathfinding gets a bit rough at times, but most of the time, when you point the squad somewhere, they make it. Of course, if a door closes, they’re boned. For some reason the AI is completely unable to open doors. If a player is running through a hallway, and a door closes between him and the squad, they’re just stuck there until the player hits an elevator or certain spots in the game where the squad magically reappears.
God, elevators are slow. Elevators can, in fact, take longer to get you somewhere than using a transport terminal which skips right to the load screen, even if the place you’re going is exactly where the elevator would take you. Players spend much of the game exploring anomalies on uncharted planets, but they should have studied that one in the Citadel.
Framerates have a few big hits, mostly in the vehicular sections, but overall the game runs nice and smooth, and I never got killed by a lack of frames, and the cannon is pretty effective even when your aim is off, or you need to flush enemies from behind cover. Combined with a stupidly powerful machine gun, one can do a lot of damage to a lot of troops in little time.
And that, frankly, is the bad. The combat and driving take some adjustment, but once you learn that pointing in a direction will get you there(especially in the Mako, there’s no need for constant readjustment and course correction at all, just point and push forward generally), things are smooth. It sounds like a lot, and it looks like a lot, but once the game starts, it manages to melt away.
The combat is actually exciting. There’s not an under the hood system dictating everything. Skill points are there to help, but it’s still all about player skill, points just stabilize a weapon, or add damage or abilities with it. But a player who can’t aim won’t have much luck with a complete skill tree. The whole thing is very fluid, with players automatically attaching to cover and moving out when they point away long enough. Pressing the left trigger will pop out to aim, releasing will return to cover, which is essential against larger enemies or those with explosives. There aren’t a lot of sure things in space, but I can say with certainty that rockets are always deadly, and running out in front of enemies with rocket launchers is a sure way to die.
Combat likes to show up when it’s unexpected, after cutscenes or dialog, though players can often manage to guide things toward or away from combat in conversation. Dialog, in Mass Effect, gets a huge upgrade from what gamers have learned to use. Up until now, with very small, rare exceptions, games with dialog options are long, ordered menus presented after a character’s lines are totally spoken, and reproduced word for word, but with little sense of intonation or emphasis. It was thorough, but dry and left players fretting over the best response.
No longer. Mass Effect presents summaries of player choices and the overall tone of what’s said. Generally, there are three responses on a radial menu, one for the higher, more righteous Paragon path, one neutral, and one for the rule-breaking, by any means necessary Renegade path. They may read as “Yes, I’ll gladly help”, “Yes, if I must”, or “No way in hell” to the player, but those choices may never actually be spoken. Instead, they become “Of course I’ll help you Chiala, nobody should be in that situation”, “I’m hesitant, but you need help, so I’ll do what it takes, Chiala”, or “Not a chance Chiala, you got yourself into it, you get yourself out.” Rarely even then is it so simply worded, but it can all be chosen before the last line is fully spoken. What that ends up doing is allowing players to pick exactly what they want to say, the dialog flows naturally, and is actually interesting. The game’s worst voice acting is “Really good”, so hearing your character speak is worth it, players don’t just mash the “skip dialog” button. Especially when guns might be drawn in the middle of things or threats exchanged. And for those players who have subtitles off(and they’re very unnecessary thanks to good audio balance and acting), if a dialog option isn’t chosen for several seconds, the last spoken line is displayed on-screen, as a reminder.
I know it doesn’t sound like much, but frankly, it’s a god damn revolution. RPGs from now on absolutely need to have radial menus and summaries of dialog. It’s faster, it flows better, it makes every conversation feel like a cutscene.
The game’s audio is just stunning as a whole, with a beautiful synthetic soundtrack. It reaches for orchestral score levels, while maintaining a perfect 80s groove, pulled from sci-fi classics. The music fits perfectly in dramatic sections, or exploration. A lonely tune playing exploring a frozen, hostile world. And when action hits, well, again, it’s perfect. The music alone says “Lasers! Pew pew!”, and that, my friends, is something we need more of.
The graphics carry the style quite well. A combination of realistic humanoid models combined with some great sci-fi stylings for some of the more alien species and locations serves the game well. Faces are particularly well detailed, even those created by players in the very nice character creation screen. It’s much easier to make something which looks good and is suited to the player’s tastes, rather than the character generation as of late which tends to be a struggle to not make something horrible(Oh, I dunno, let’s say Oblivion). Aliens are creative, NPCs look good, and settings are great. There are two complaints I have regarding the graphics, and they are, generally, small. The level of detail on faces is high, but there are a few humans with shaved heads where there’s a visible drop in definition, even a change in texture from a wrinkled old man’s face to a taut, smooth bald head. Shading can look odd at times, sometimes appearing more as stippling than shadow due to the way it looks to affect individual pixels. Sparkles of light and darkness play on the surfaces, looking grainy and incomplete at points.
There’s a certain appeal to exploring the galaxy which is hard to quantify. When you drop down in a heavily armed armored vehicle on an unexplored planet with stunningly dangerous conditions outside, there’s a sense of wonder, even though the worlds tend to have some copy/paste features. Bases laid out the same or at least, amazingly similarly, and mines, for example, on lots of worlds. Sometimes it seems like there’s a company building generic pirate and space bases for deployment on remote worlds, but since there’s only a few companies making ships and armor, it’s not far-fetched to think of it that way.
And even with the repetition, you’re roaming all over space, doing your thing. Every planet you can reach has, at the very least, flavor text. Many can be surveyed for side-quest items, or landed on. Even some asteroid belts have pieces of side-quest gear attached, be it minerals or artifacts lost in debris. Large areas can be explored when a planet can be landed on, though some planets only have a few items, while others are gold mines(or plutonium, platinum, lead, aluminum, or a host of other metals you can find for experience points and credits).
Mass Effect captures the feeling of space opera perfectly, happily taking influence from classic movies, books, and games. There are certainly flaws, but once you’re into the game, they’re mostly forgotten. It’s an amazing experience, and as is usual for Bioware, the experience is what you remember afterward. And just to encourage you to do it again, achievements earned in game do more than give points to the gamerscore, they give actual in-game bonuses. More health, more ammo, or unlocked skill trees for new characters, regardless of class. Higher levels to cap with and start at even. It takes the idea of “New Game +” to a great new place. The combat is fun, the story is great, and it’s all extremely memorable, and begs for the sequel to hurry up.
Mass Effect gets 4.5 of 5 canes. The menu problems really are awful, and the elevators are a big distraction, even if the conversations taking place during the rides are nice. If Bioware takes the chance to patch the menus to something useable, it just might push the game’s score to the fifth cane. As long as you can tolerate some bad menus, there’s an amazing game to be had here, and every 360 owner should have it.
