Pros: great graphics, good customization, amazing experience, high quality production
Cons: load times, vehicle controls, false sense of freedom
The bottom line: Ambitious and epic, Mass Effect lives up to the hype, but not without a few rough spots here and there.
Mass Effect, the latest offering by Bioware, exclusive to the Xbox 360, just goes to show that M$ does indeed have the cash to guarantee its own exclusives (and to expand the still tiny library of RPGs on the 360). In the end though, Mass Effect, amidst the whole sex-scene hype and purported revolutionary RPG system, is still probably the best RPG of 2007.

With a nice hot 91% overall at GameRankings, the reviewer response has been a nice thumbs-up across the board. However, after playing the game, I’ve got a few plain ugly things to mention, and while the good are far and many, and I am still giving this game 4/5 stars for the quirks and glitches you’ll find only after completing the game.

The Good

In brief, rather than rehashing in detail what plenty of reviews have spelled out, Mass Effect is one of the most ambitious sci-fi RPGs you’ll see since Knights of the Old Republic. Bioware set out to create an entire universe worth exploring, complete with various planets, side-quests, alien species, and the all too infamous alien-sex scene that raised eye-balls (and was a wise-marketing PR move since this game is targeted to the all too male adolescent audience…).

The plot has you playing as Commander Shepard, one of those “I look way too good for my job” guys who almost never smiles in the game. You can of course make him into any gender or appearance and customize his job class, but he has to remain human. The role of Shepard is that you get appointed as a special “Spectre” title (= Jedi), that gives him the ability to travel the galaxy with elite status in order to investigate the actions of Saren- a purported rogue Spectre (=Darth Maul) who has teamed up with the Geth race in order to harness ancient space technology for evil purposes. Along the way you’ll team up with a ragtag team or alien and human allies.

One of the game’s shining points has been the dialog system, which while it doesn’t really give you freedom to say stuff you want to say, it at least pretends like you have the choice. You’ll find out as you play more and more, that the responses you have often still elicit the SAME responses by the NPCs so the feeling of you saying stuff is really all in all, just a feeling. As you dialog with NPCs though, some choices do make a difference, particularly those involving a “help or don’t help” decision”. Finally there’s also the “love interest” dialog, which will allow you to hook up with one of your party members. You can play as a female protagonist and hook up with an alien-female protagonist late game, which was what caused some buzz on the internet, but for the family crowd- the sex scene is pretty minor. At most you’ll catch for a second the silhouette of a naked female figure, and there will be some suggestive dialog, but that’s it. The sex scene is also part of the script, you’ll encounter it as part of the game (the characters decide to get freaky before their last mission) and then you can decide whether you’re up for it or not.

Again in brief, the good highlights of this game are, the ridiculous epic scale, the amazingly gorgeous graphics (which come at a horrible cost as I’ll later mention), the sort of FPS-style shooter RPG hybrid, the ability to choose dialog and customize characters, and the storyline. We’ll move on the more interesting and less talked about stuff.

The Bad

There’s a bunch here actually that I feel doesn’t get mentioned in most reviews. Now bad for me is loosely defined as “annoying”, with the ugly consisting of the plain unforgivable aspects.

The item management system starts off quite confusing and convoluted. At first you’ll really have no idea what you are doing, but once you get the hang of it, it’ll become more intuitive. All the items have a roman numeral after it, with higher being better. There are different weapons for each weapon type so you can kind of pick which gun fits your play style better, and then different types of guns to equip your character with. Each character gets fully loaded with 4 guns, a pistol, assault rifle, sniper rifle and shotgun. You might think sniper rifle would be fun, but the aiming is unsteady as hell until you get item upgrades that allow you to stabilize.

Your extra items you have a choice to sell them or convert to omnigels, which become important for repairing your vehicle in the game and hacking consoles.

The hacking console mini-game was the subject of a few ticked off reviewers but it’s really easy. When you hack a console you have a choice of consuming omnigels or going through the mini-button game, which simply shows you a button pad and tells you to press certain buttons in sequential order. The trick to this game is to play it a little slower. If you go too fast you’ll end up tapping a button twice when you shouldn’t have to and if you mess up once, you can’t hack the console (resulting in loss XP and/or items). So hacking is pretty important, but it does often take a few tries to get good at it.

The pseudo FPS-RPG game style might not appeal to some gamers. I certainly hated it when I first started. Firing at enemies is confusing because at times you hit them no matter what, at other times you have to be right on target. The amount of damage you do initially too is also so paltry you’ll find yourself frustrated. Later in the game though, you’ll be blasting huge amounts of damage that you can kill people in mostly 2-3 hits like a true FPS game, which makes the experience much better. It takes a while to get adjusted to, but keep in mind that it’s meant to be a pseudo FPS. Without a jump button, there still is some dodging aspect but it’s mostly from standing behind cover, and then popping out to fire (think MGS).

The Ugly

There are a few missions that involve you driving a vehicle, and blowing up turrets, while navigating on the planet’s surface. A cool concept, but the vehicle controls are downright atrocious. You aim and fire the weapon using the right analog and the A button, while on the left analog you steer and accelerate. The problem here is that aiming and steering are both based on the camera angle, so you’ll end up going toward the enemy if you’re accelerating while firing. This forces you to stop firing when you need to dodge, and then to only resume while mostly stationary. Alternatively you can use the boosters to dodge while still firing and this is what you’ll likely end up doing once you get good at it.

Another painful aspect to the game that I faced was that while this game is epic, it is also a false kind of epic. There are a lot of side quests, but there are tons of planets in the galaxy that you cannot visit, and a lot of the game is the impression that is “wow non-linear” at first, but after you reality all the things you cannot do, it becomes really quite obvious how linear it is. It would be nice to visit a few more planets to flesh out the alien homeworlds, but yeah, none of that here. You’ll be spending most of your time exploring a few seedier planets with criminal organizations, which is fun, but there’s a lack of populated planets, and far too many backwater places.

Finally the really ugly portion of the game lies in the map system and the elevator load time. It’s nice that they integrated the load time into elevator scenes, but far too often as you traverse the game you’ll occasionally run into the loading DVD hiccup and textures will load as you are playing the game. Some of the aspects of the city are artificially separated with a lot of corridor and walking distance to also give the game more time to load itself, and you’ll notice the way things are laid out on the map (lots of elevators and sparse amounts of actual NPCs) as part of the games attempt to immerse you artificially while giving itself plenty of elevator time for loading… The map system is non-intuitive and forces you to mark waypoints in order to find destinations, further adding to the frustration. An on-screen overlaid map would have been greatly appreciated, but that’s where when this game hits the PC (years from now like KotOR…), it’ll likely be a better experience.

Conclusion

Mass Effect is the best RPG for the 360 to this day and I certainly had a feeling of pure amazement when I first played it for the first few hours. After that though, you’ll start to see through the smoke and mirrors that Bioware has put up and discover the game is not nearly as epic or free as it purports itself to be, and bit by bit the annoying quirks to the game will start to show up. None of them will be deal-breakers, the core of the gameplay, finding great items, helping NPCs and killing bad guys are all there, but like Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect is not without its flaws.

Again, with high production values, a great storyline, amazing graphics that are probably among the best the 360 has to offer today, and an excellent RPG engine, Mass Effect is worth a buy and maybe a rent if you’re on the more hesitant side. It will take at least a full week or two of dedicated play to beat though, and my clock-in time is around 25 hours for mostly storyline and minimal side-quests.