If you're actually following this thing I apologize for not updating in...well, however long it's been since I last updated. I must admit, writing a blog didn't end up as appealing to myself as I'd hoped, and so I find it a bit challenging to sit down and actually give this thing some love. Either way, I'm well past the 24-hour mark since I've last slept and I don't feel an onset of much-needed drowsiness coming on anytime soon, and so here's my review of (as you may have guessed by the terrible pun in the title) Mass Effect.
Mass Effect is what I would consider the perfect game for me to review. Don't take that as any suggestion that the game itself is in any way perfect, god no. What I mean by that is, it's a double-whammy of pleasure on my end. Playing through it, it was an overall good, maybe even exceptional gaming experience that I enjoyed and into which I ended up clocking 100-some odd hours...but it's leaking bugs and poor design choices out the proverbial ass. Meaning, I get to play a fun game that keeps me occupied for a long time...but there's still so much to bitch about! And man, do I love to bitch. Nit-picking, for me, is like waking up every afternoon after 15 hours of sleep, taking a bath in a massive and freshly-filled tub of cash and then kicking a crocodile in the face while rescuing a promiscuously-clad dame with each arm.
Right, Mass Effect.
The player is thrown into a universe in which all-English-speaking humans have recently made contact with all-English-speaking aliens and joined their all-English-speaking space colony and are fighting for their right to move into more planets already inhabited by gigantic flesh-eating subterranean burrow-worms. You play as Space Commander Shepherd (you're given the opportunity to choose Shepherd's first name and gender but you may as well be named Nippledicks as far as the game is concerned, everyone's just going to conveniently call you Shepherd anyway), who within 20 minutes of gameplay is given a privileged position in the Citadel military that he had previously never heard of before. Surely enough, a mission to save the galaxy ensues, and you can even choose to follow it when you're not headed off to random planets to prospect rare metals and do "Kill everything that moves in this base" side missions.
Before Mass Effect came out, it promised a fully customizable character and important game-altering dialogue choices to be made by the player, all set in a Massive, fully-explorable galaxy.
Well, Shepherd is going to end up looking ugly as fuck no matter how many different ways you slide the millions of bars that customize his eyebrows alone. He's going to have dark, short hair no matter which of the 7 or 8 different hairstyles and colors you choose from, and honestly, who didn't pick the big jagged scar running across the eye? To be fair I hadn't tried anything with customizing a female character, but judging by the in-game NPC models I wouldn't have fared much better there either.
It's strikingly similar with the dialogue choices as well. With every conversation, you have the option to be a complete dick, a bleeding-heart pussy, or a completely neutral stoic with no strong feelings this way or that. No matter which you pick, the storyline is still going to progress whichever way it damn well pleases, with the only difference being you can get an achievement for being extra extra nice, and one for being extra extra grouchy. For example, if someone asks you to go to the other side of the Milky Way to murder someone they're having a disagreement with, you can respond "HELLS YEAH, LOCK AND LOAD MOTHERFUCKERS!" if your character has an asshole-ish disposition. And off you go to murder someone. If you're a huggy-bear of a man who greets everyone with a smile and a complementary handy, you'll exclaim, "Goodness, no! That would be illegal!" The quest-giver will then promptly bully you into taking the mission anyway. Either way, you can choose to do or not do the mission in the first place, but no matter how friendly or dickly you are, you're still going to end up with the mission in your journal, and if you choose to do it, it's not going to affect your nice or mean points anyway.
And about the expansive universe? You spend all of your time fast-travelling from system to system doing missions and exploring, but there's still only 1 planet per system you can actually land on to rush off and do something other than study your galactic map. And each planet is embarrassingly small...for being a game so interested in space exploration, I find it mind-boggling that Mass Effect stills buys into the whole idea of planets being flat, presumably because the Catholic Church keeps mailing it Cease and Desist letters and threatening it with house arrest. If you drive your space-buggy shopping cart too far off of the designated 2'x2' square of terrain dubbed worthy of exploring, your cripple spaceship pilot will slap you on the wrist, pick you up, and throw you back to where you started. It really takes away from the idea of the game being massive when you really have somewhere around 20 small levels to play on. It's kind of like Mass Effect spent its time claiming to have the world's biggest penny, only on release day to hold the penny very close up to our eyes. Sure Lincoln's gonna look pretty big, but as soon as he gets pulled away he's still the size of your fingernail.
What I'm trying to get at is that Mass Effect is a very misleading game. It wants you to feel like you have more freedom than you really do. There are plenty of pointless side quests to take care of, but truthfully the game is just as linear as any other action-RPG, and it's borderline infuriating when you realize that the wool's been pulled over your eyes, and BioWare didn't even do a very good job of convincing you that it was just trying to keep your head warm.
To its credit though, the game does have a fairly compelling, if a bit cliched story, and the characters are generally more than likable (except Ashley). The action is solid even if it is in dire need of a lock-on system, and despite the fact that your character insists on standing on an anchored boat while the tide rises every time he zooms in to snipe. There's a fair amount of gear, upgrades and different classes to choose from that can keep you busy for a while and let you do an admirable amount of customization to your style of gameplay (until you buy all the licenses to the Specter Prototype weapons anyway. At that point all the other weapons can just fuck off).
Like I said in the beginning, it's an enjoyable game despite all its flaws, and even those can add to the fun - make a sidequest out of discovering all the not quite game breaking flaws during your playthrough.
I'd recommend it for at least a rent.
7.5/10
Please excuse any typos, grammatical errors, or horrendously offensive racial slurs that may have slipped by. I haven't slept in a while. (honkeys)
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