Review: Mass Effect: Bring Down the Sky

Grade: B-
Time Spent Playing: 90 minutes

If you're going into Bring Down the Sky like I did, thinking it was comparable to the main story missions of the game, you're going to be disappointed. What's here is effectively a beefed up side mission. The locales are put together by previously existing assets as far as I can tell and there is little here that isn't like 99% of the rest of the game. Of course, the rest of this game is friggin' amazing so maybe it's not such a bad thing.

I have to admit, the Batarians are pretty cool, but the story here is straight forward. The Batarian Osama Bin Laden wants to crash an asteroid onto a colony of millions of people in retribution for perceived offenses against his kind. You have to stop him. There's no twist here at the end.

It would have been cool if this download added more to the game, like the Batarians themselves. Just because their civilization lives in self-imposed exile doesn't mean there can't be individual Batarians running around Citadel space, perhaps acting as catalysts for other side missions or small story segments.

The saving grace is the gameplay. It could be that I'm playing through on hard--or whatever they call it in this game--but this was a really tough mission. Your enemies are tenacious bastards who will use every tech/biotic power in the game against you. One enjoyable segment had me navigating a mine field while jerkwads fired at me from cover.

Five bucks just seems like too much to pay for what you're getting. Had they actually used the Batarians to expand the game universe or delivered an experience more on the level of the main missions of Mass Effect, then I could unabashedly recommend it. As it stands, it's really only for people who enjoy challenging gameplay.

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.