Mass Effect (360)
created by Bioware, 2007

food for the fanboys

review written by: Gamer-girl

As a publisher, creating a new brand (intellectual property or IP) is a big risk. For every Halo and Bioshock that stuffs your wallet, there’s ten Preys and Psychonautss waiting to leave it empty. After all, the quality of the game doesn't guarantee anything. Think of it in terms of your own money – would you give your life savings to the guy that knocks on your front door and has a ‘great idea’? Or would you make a few safe bank deposits?

A single development flaw is suddenly a much bigger deal. A hole in marketing, design, human resources, or timing might weaken a strong license, but that same hole would destroy a new IP. Madden ’08 sales are not going to suffer greatly if Electronic Arts fires the lead artist. But without a truly talented and lucky team, Weird Game X just isn’t going to return a profit, if it’s even finished in the first place.

Mass Effect was indeed a big, fat risk, but it was made less risky by an easily understood setting (all it’s missing is a few Sith Lords, really) and by the simple fact that it was made by a fanboy favorite, Bioware. It’s fair to say that Bioware will see a profitable return on their investment, but it could have been so much more.

In Mass Effect, you first create a highly customizable character. Your last name is Shepherd – conveniently, everyone in the game addresses you in a military style. You select your first name, gender, hair, childhood, past trauma, helmet-o-hair, a character class, and attempt to rearrange your features so as not to look like a complete mutant. You then arrive on Eden Prime, leading a squad in a top-secret mission defending against alien invaders. Your goal? Recover the alien artifact, called the Beacon. But instead of recovering it, you, end up activating it and receiving a bunch of memories from 50,000 year-old predecessor aliens. This uniquely qualifies you for the rest of the tasks the space government has prepared for you.

Your new home, the Normandy

You spend the remainder of the game chasing after a rogue government agent, hopping from planet to planet in search of him, his cronies, and preventing his evil deeds. The central plot in itself is nothing to write home about, but it’s thick enough with interesting twists and discoveries, and almost all of the voice acting is a treat. The female protagonist and Seth Green’s part (your ship’s pilot, ‘Joker’) are particularly engaging. Overall, the setting is lush and compelling. Their world designers are to be commended. I really felt like I was entering a new world, with thousands (millions?) of years of history and culture, not to mention a future I wanted to see play out and a universe I wanted to explore. My only complaint, if it counts as one, is that I wanted to see more races and more locations, all of which are already being concepted, I’m certain. For those who are obsessive about these kinds of things, there’s also a Codex in the game, complete with voice acting, describing more fictional details then even I would ever want.

The Bioware conversation tree has definitely evolved for the better. Instead of reading a paragraph to make your selection, you read a short synopsis. “It was.” turns into “The geth were crawling all over those ruins. We were lucky to make it out alive”, which makes sense in context. Furthermore, you’re given your options just as a character is about to finish speaking, which lets you quickly make your selection and get on with it. No more long silences, unless you want them. You’re not actually ever rushed in making your decision – it just naturally flows from one speaker to the next with an admirable grace. And no, contrary to rumor or premature hype, characters do not get annoyed if you interrupt them mid-sentence (thank you, Bioware, that would have been awful). The finishing touch to the entire game, however, was the great use of camera. As you talk to characters and initiate events, it feels as though you are part cinematographer, participating in a big-screen production. Very mundane activities (talking to a receptionist, checking in on a friend) are elevated into dynamic experiences.

There are a good number of side-quests and distracting missions to pad out the relatively short plot, though ideally there would be more variance of mission type – most are cleared by killing all enemies in an area, or getting to the end of a dialogue tree. In a bit of departure from Bioware tradition, you cannot be utterly evil or a complete goody two-shoes, even in silly side-quests. You’re always a gruff military veteran, and the moral quandary is more whether to be a nice-but-stern commander (a Paragon) or a roguish dick of a commander (a Renegade).

Finally, the combat plays out like a streamlined mix of shooter and other Bioware RPGs, with convenient auto-targeting. And though there is no ammunition (no bullet count, no clips, etc), it is possible to overheat your weapon if you fire it too quickly. Overall, even as someone that vastly prefers RPGs to shooters, I felt the combat is more fun than Knights of the Old Republic. Driving around in your land-tank (the 'mako') is also a new thrill in an RPG, complete with goofy jump-jets.

The first flaw you’ll notice as a player is the texture pop-in. What do I mean? Well, following in the illustrious footsteps of Halo 2, whenever the camera does its lovely cinematic turn to face someone who’s talking, they might be missing their color, or their bump map, or their fine detail. When watching my ship depart from a port, I counted four separate texture pop-ins: it began as a flat grey. Over the course of a few seconds, it gained white stripes, then became shiny, then some rivets and scratches appeared, and finally voila, lettering and blinking lights. Very, very sloppy. It baffles me that an error like that was left into a published product.

It looks nice... when it finishes loading...

You know what else is sloppy? An inventory/equipment system that should have its own tutorial. It took me a good ten minutes to figure out what the hell was going on when I should have been easily putting on new equipment. Not only that, but there is no way to access your inventory in general to see your armors, weapons, upgrades, goo, licenses, medi-packs, grenades, and whatever else at once. Yet about 8 hours into the game you’ll suddenly be told you have a limit of 150 items – good luck sorting through it all. At least the game’s only 15ish hours long, right? Only another 7-8 hours of that torture.

The award for Laziest Designer, though, goes to whoever thought reflexive button-pushing was a brilliant idea. Apparently picking a lock and surveying ore are the same task. Want to deactivate an atomic bomb? Just press A! Then A! Then Y! No, stupid, I said Y! Not fast enough! Or you could just use some of that useful omni-gel (aka useful goo) stuff and magically hack your way past. Not so fun.

No wait, we have a new contender for Laziest Designer. Someone clearly didn’t want to take the time to actually optimize their engine and instead decided that long elevators were the best way to prevent loading screens. Oh wait, except there are loading screens all over the place, made marginally more tolerable by pretty pictures. Yeah, Microsoft, thanks a lot for making my hard-drive off-limits to Bioware. I really appreciate it. Man, elevators rock.

The longest-feeling of these elevator rides is between the main deck (where you choose new destinations and talk to half of your party) and the subdeck (where you talk to the rest of your party). Those of you Bioware fans who recall fond memories of corrupting pure souls and/or bringing others to salvation will be utterly disappointed. The party member character arcs are utterly pre-determined and uninfluenced by anything you could say. Usually they’re not even arcing at all – they’re just telling you more about themselves. Gone are the days of influencing your friends to kill each other, or in fact do anything at all interesting.

A lot more effort should have been made to balance the classes, too. Some classes are like playing the game on easy mode (Soldier) and others are like asking for Christmas poo. At this point I must confess that I have not yet beaten the game – the final area is very difficult for those of us that decided to play an Infiltrator. You have been warned.

The combat system, although cool, is also extremely clunky, particularly when in your vehicle. Sure, ducking behind cover was cool in Gears of War and it’s fun here too, when it works. When it doesn’t, I’m either waiting to be shot in the open, or I’m trying to crouch behind a brick. I also can’t imagine who would want their grenades to be mapped to the Back button. Look, people, this is what a 360 controller looks like:

The grenades button is... where again?

See where the Back button is? For a normal human, no fingers are near there! In order to reach it, I would have to take my left thumb off of the analog stick, leaving my character standing in place. Am I supposed to believe that I’m an interstellar badass that can fight off alien invasions without breaking a sweat and yet in order to throw grenades I have to stand still? Or am I supposed to throw grenades with my tongue?

And the final gripe is actually rather crucial because it completely undermines what is supposed to be a feature of the game. You know how when you leave the first newbie area, you’re supposed to be able to explore the universe? Wander around, go wherever you want? No, no, no. You have it all wrong. You see, there’s a secret order in which you must go to each of the planets, or you’ll be killed instantly because they’re too hard for you! And don’t even think of trying to reason the order out for yourself – the nearest one is the hardest of the initial options! It’s tempting to think they were placed by a deranged mind, laughing as players die and die out of trust in their all-powerful game designers…

It has many problems, but we console-players are so hungry for a quality RPG that we’ll put up with almost anything to experience a world as immersive as this. So my main character is slightly malformed-looking and her eyebrows take a second to appear sometimes – what about all those worlds I still want to see? What about saving the universe?

Mass Effect is an enjoyable but forgettable beginning of what could have been something great. With any luck, Mass Effect 2 will be less clunky, which will be just enough to draw me back for more.

P.S.
No, I do not care about the alien lesbian sex scene. Just shut up about it already.