Review: Mass Effect

Grade: A-
Time Spent Playing: 40 hours


It is every earth man's dream to travel among the stars, killing bug faced aliens and taking blue skinned ladies to bed. Mass Effect lets you do this, but certainly more of the former and less of the latter. Which is disappointing because I would like to see how mankind's discovery of telekinesis and other paranormal powers would affect bedroom antics. But since we're far more comfortable with seeing bodies mutilated than we are with seeing them kissed, I'll just have to be satisfied with blowing those blue skinned ladies to hell.

Mass Effect takes place a few hundred years in the future. Thanks to the discovery of alien technology on Mars, humanity began exploring space and eventually came into contact with the Citadel Council, basically the United Nations of space. The Council commissions uber-agents called Spectres to enforce galactic justice when conventional means fail. As the player, you control the first human Spectre, and your choices will shape humanity's future in the galaxy.

At its core, Mass Effect is story driven RPG. You pick a class, level up, spend points on skills and powers you'd like to develop, and spend a lot of time exploring both uncharted regions of space and busy space ports. A cool addition is that not only can you change your character's gender and appearance to your liking, you can actually pick a personal history for him, which will have repercussions later in the game. For example, as an earth born orphan, you might have run ins with snobby aliens who look down on earth as a blighted world or with members of street gangs you ran with as a youth.

The gameplay twist is that action is handled more like a tactical third person shooter than a traditional, turn based rpg. While there are unseen statistics determining things like how well your character can aim his shotgun--protip: don't use weapons you're not trained with--the feel is action oriented. There is a tactical element introduced in that you can give instructions to team mates, but I found it far more fun to just them let do their own thing. I've seen a lot of criticism about the shooting sequences and I really don't know what these walking vaginas are complaining about. Use cover, use your powers, and remember to heal your team mates and it's really not all that tough. A few of the boss battles might require a few replays but that doesn't seem entirely too much to ask.

As far as story goes, Mass Effect delivers a delicious piece of space opera in which your character hunts down a rogue Spectre named Saren, whose true goals and motivations are revealed with each mission you take. The story is helped by the incredibly detailed and thoughtful universe the team at Bioware has come up with. The aliens in this game all have unique histories, physiologies, and motivations. Every single planet at least has some description of its geology, ecology, and atmosphere. One can only imagine there is a Silmarrion-esque tome kept hidden deep in the BioWare complex.

So what are the problems with this rad game? Well, while the graphics are nice, the textures load slowly enough that often times when you enter a new area or initiate a conversation you're looking at some strange mess of clay sculptures for the first few moments. It doesn't affect gameplay but it is annoying. The menu system is screwed; it's slow and unintuitive. Buying new items is a hassle because you can't just decide to look at a shop's items in like groups, you have to scroll down through a bunch of stuff you don't care about. Also, why can't they just pair human armors with alien armors? The side quests start to feel like chores and offer little variety. Every derelict space ship, every mining camp, every warehouse, looks exactly the same and often share an identical floor plan. Even landing down on barren planets begins to feel like a chore when all you're doing is surveying raw materials and recovering items from crashed probes.

All that said, Mass Effect is great in spite of its flaws. Hopefully, a sequel will address those problems.