BioWare has made quite a name for itself when it comes to console and PC Role Playing Games (RPGs). From the PC’s Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights to the Xbox 360 and PC’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR), Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age.
In 2007, BioWare released Mass Effect, an Xbox 360 exclusive published by Microsoft Game Studios and EA, which was later ported to the PC. Mass Effect brings together a deep and intricate storyline, characters with depth and emotion, an involved RPG system, and a sci-fi action shooter to form this massive action RPG game.
You are Commander Shepard and as with any true RPG, you do have the ability to choose your gender. The character of Shepard is portrayed as a man in the default campaign and in the Mass Effect universe, however the game seamlessly allows you to choose your gender with no story repercussions. I chose to create a female Shepard so Shepard will be referred to as a female in this review. The character customization is pretty decent although while there are a lot of categories for altering, the changes are small and sometimes not very noticeable. I created two different characters and even though I tried to make them look different, they still carry over some very similar facial characteristics. They could, in fact, be sisters. That being said, I am just happy they allow you to choose your gender. After you customize your look, you can then customize your back story. This is rather crafty as these decisions will affect aspects of the story like how people perceive you and give you a unique experience each time through. When this is complete, the story begins.
First off, there is a lot to learn in this game. You earn experience for pretty much everything you do and when you gather enough XP, you level up. Leveling up grants you Squad Points that can be spent on individual character attributes which can pertain to their combat abilities, shield capabilities, biotic abilities, and specific class-based abilities, and even attitude. You can open up new abilities when you have spent enough ranks in specific abilities or by certain plot advancements. Leveling up goes hand in hand with combat in this game. Mass Effect is a third-person view shooter, much like Gears of War and Lost Planet 2. You can aim for “better” targeting but until you spend the ranks in the right places, combat might prove frustrating. I play a lot of first person shooters (FPS) so I played the combat out a lot like I would play Halo. Aim and shoot, aim for the head…and shoot. In Mass Effect, aiming does you little good. In fact, the reticle only needs to be orange when you shoot. In the early levels of your character, aiming does literally no good. After about the first 10 levels or so, combat starts to get easier. After a brief second playthrough employing the combat tactics I learned too late the first time, it seemed that combat was a lot easier for me. I had almost quit the game but once I got out of the “shooter” mentality, I was able to get more out of the combat stylings. A great thing about combat is that there is no ammo to pick up but you do need to worry about your weapon overheating. It was a nice way to balance out the difficulty without having to ration bullets or worse, spend precious time searching for them.
The next aspect of combat involves your biotic abilities. In essence, these would be akin to spells in the more traditional RPG sense. These abilities allow you to use Mass Effect Fields to strengthen up your shields, lift enemies into the air making them more vulnerable to attacks, lock them in place, throw them into objects, or even cause physical damage to a target. Mastering your character’s biotic abilities is essential to combat and when combined with traditional weapon attacks, can make you a very powerful force.
Other abilities that can affect your character are the Tech abilities which allow you to hack or reverse engineer technologies. These can be used on and off the battlefield. In some cases, it acts like a lock pick skill as there are various locked crates, lockers, locked doors, and parts to salvage. If your skill is too low, you will not get to open these items and get the treasures that lie within which are typically equipment, omni-gel, or medi-gel. Some items will require you to bypass or hack into them. A box comes up and you must press the X-Y-A-B buttons as they light up, take too long and you will have to use omni-gel to bypass it instead. Let’s just say that this action got really old, really fast and was a rather uninventive solution to get the player involved in the hacking.
Equipment can be accessed through the Equipment menu and can be used to equip characters with weapons, armor, and power ups. The Equipment menu is a bit of a clunky mess. The whole thing is confusing as you try to figure out what you have equipped and what stats you need to be looking at. You can cycle through your four weapon categories, armor, and any special abilities your characters might possess. You can even install power ups that enhance your equipment. The menu was so clunky that I didn’t spend a lot of time on equipment, which was why I probably had some issues until I started to get more into the game. You are going to want to equip those better weapons and armor, it’ll make the game a lot more fun. (The UI was updated for the PC version, however, the Xbox 360 version remains the same.)
Health is regained with either a shot of Medi-Gel which when Shepard administers it, any character in the squads that needs health will get it, their skills/ability ranks/power ups will determine how much health they can get.
A small but hefty portion of your game play will involve the MAKO, an infantry fighting vehicle that is capable of withstanding high drops, extreme temperatures – hot or cold, and traverse rough terrain. It is equipped with a turreted cannon and a coaxial-mounted machine gun that essentially allows for mobile vehicular combat. I grew very weary of the Mako and unfortunately, every time you land on a planet you deploy the Mako and travel across the terrain looking for minerals, anomalies, and whatever the objective may be. The Mako was indeed all-terrain as you could drive it almost upside down in some areas. Other times it would simply just deny your passing through. The control was a little wonky by I can chalk that up to the whole gravity changes in space thing. Combat in the Mako was kinda fun at first but quickly got old. As much as I like the idea of planetary exploration, I wasn’t thrilled that this was how it was to be done.
The story in Mass Effect is somewhat determined by the player’s decisions. The conversation is broken up into a wheel structure. Some conversation paths will give you Paragon or Renegade points which basically lay down your morality path. It seems that a a lot of games are allowing you to choose your alignment and I enjoy that aspect. It is a simple conversation system and seems to work pretty well.
The game also allows for romance. This was the subject of a lot of criticism in the news media, most notably from the FOX news network. It was apparent that they did very little research into this aspect of the game as they didn’t even begin to understand its significance. GameTrailers’ Geoff Keighly did a good job of trying to educate them, but they were far from caring about anything other than the idea of sexual relations in a game. To the game’s credit, it is not about a casual encounter. The relationship takes time and patience to cultivate and, in fact, happened almost 30 hours into my game. There are only two characters that are available for romancing but it’s worth noting that the game will allow both straight and gay romances.
The game’s main gameplay aspects are mission based. You have your main plot missions and then you have your side quests. Side quests are optional but will grant you XP, credits, special items, as well as game achievements. Your main base is aboard the Normandy, a Systems Alliance starship. From here you can speak to your squad, level them up, and navigate the galaxies. From the Combat Information Center (CIC), you can access the Galaxy Map and navigate to the star systems, then planets you want to visit. Some planets will contain artifacts and resources and some will be the location of a side quest or a main mission. You may visit a planet multiple times.
One of the main locations in Mass Effect is the Citadel. This is the galaxy’s main hub, a massive space station in the Serpent Nebula. You will spend a good portion of the game here especially in the beginning. The Citadel is a beautiful and modern city and, in a way, captures the idea of what a space station of the future might be like. Other portions of the game like during the many missions that involve landing on a planet and entering a colony building aren’t so spectacular. In fact, they are almost always laid out the same however, the level designers began to throw in these rooms full of boxes that acted like mazes. This just gets stupid after a while.
The music is a spectacular companion to the game. It’s worth a listen to outside of the game.
Mass Effect is a beautiful and robust gaming experience. It brings to the table a spectacular story line, interesting characters, an emotional connection between the player and the game, as well as a living breathing role playing action game. You can expect at least 40 hours in your first run through of the game and at one point, you may even be inclined to play the game through again, making different decisions. Apart from some technical tweaks to the combat system and the equipment menu, the game is awesome. The sequel, Mass Effect 2, addresses some of these issues but if RPGs and shooters are your thing, Mass Effect holds up now, almost four years later, as well as it did when it came out in 2007. If you haven’t played this game by now, you should run out, right now, and get it. And while you’re out there, you’ll want to pick up a copy of Mass Effect 2.
Mass Effect is available now for the Xbox 360 and the PC. This review is based on the Xbox 360 version.
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