Mass Effect Review

Did you love Knights of Old Republic (KoTOR)? I sure as hell did so when Mass Effect came out I was filled with glee since I would have the opportunity to play another lite RPG. I actually prefer lite RPGs over their heavyweight counterparts since having to make Excel spreadsheets comparing armor ratings is not my idea of a good time. But getting some gear, credits and a few party members together to clear a room with heavy weapons is a good time.

Mass Effect though does not even come close to the awesome that was KoTOR. At first I thought I was not enjoying Mass Effect because it did not have lightsabers like KoTOR but then so many things started annoying me that I realized my lack of interest in the game was not from the lack of being able to use force powers and lightsabers, but because some of the gameplay features were actually a step backwards from KoTOR. How did Bioware do this and not stop themselves midway is beyond excusable.

First off, the inventory system is total trash. I believe Yahtzee -- name drop -- would call it rubbish or shit in that friendly British way but I will just say it is trash. You can not remove gear from your teammates easily to ensure you current party has the best stuff, all of the items when you go to buy and sell are just a jumbled mess with little rhyme or reason, and when you go to buy new items from your armor master you can not look at what your squad members have and compare. You can do that on a shop at one of the space stations but otherwise it is impossible.

Second, I came to loathe the dialog system. This is an area where I think you can really scrimp a little and no one will notice. Do you really need Counsellor Troi, Seth Green, Lance Hendriksen, and that guy who does the Navy ads for voice work? Put that money to better use next time like more core story plots. One nice thing about KoTOR was that as you spoke with someone their entire text would show up on the screen so if you did not t want to hear them you could just read what they said and move on with the choices. Now though, not only does the dialog not show up, but you have to listen to the whole conversation and then your own character speaks now as well. And damn do people love to speak. I found myself skipping entire cuts of dialog just to get done with this game in a timely fashion.

Speaking of people, the squad management system, you know one of those core pieces for a game like this, does not allow you to switch characters after you land. You could do this with KoTOR so why not now? If you get the wrong person then you have to go back to the ship, swap out the people and the start over again. I fail to see the reason why. Even worse is that you cannot switch between your party members during a fight. So, say you are on a mission but your main character goes down. Now instead of being able to flip over to another member and keep fighting (or revive them) you are stuck with having to reload the game. Sure I could be more careful but trusting your NPCs in any game simply leads to the inevitable situation of everyone dying repeatedly and often.

In regards to other failures the entire vehicle system is a complete and utter waste of your time. Bioware should have dropped this idea entirely and stuck with what worked in KoTOR: six or seven big planets that are huge and contribute to the story. These wild goose chase side missions all over the galaxy just became annoying. Yes there were annoying side missions in KoTOR (hey go under water and get stuff) but at least your travel was kept to one planet and not across entire star systems. But, the real downer of that is if you don’t do those missions then you probably cannot afford the best gear that you will need for the final battles. What you are looking at is probably about half your game time doing forced grind missions.

The vehicle itself for these errand runs handles like a bumper car without the promise of a cotton candy afterwards. You can go to the green planet and shoot things, or you can go to the red planet and shoot things, or you can go to the moon and shoot things. Whatever the case you can drive around (if you want to call going up an 80 degree slope driving) and also look for resources and artifacts. I can only assume these were included to appease the obsessive compulsive shut-ins who will play this game for fifty hours.

But, truly the type of person who would shut themselves in and try to find all 50 instances of uranium on the planets really probably is only interested in one thing: digital sex since real life sex is an impossibility for them. The love story in Mass Effect is the DUMBEST most tacked on storyline I’ve ever seen in a game and makes about as much sense as the love story in the old game Custer’s Revenge. I will give Bioware credit for telling people it was in there since it probably let them sell another half million units but it was so unnecessary. When I was told this was in there I didn’t believe it but lo and behold sure enough right near the end of the game I’m seeing alien butt going horizontal on my female captain. So not only was it alien love, it was lesbian alien love. It went from slightly interesting to I-cannot-fast-forward-fast-enough in about 5 seconds. I’d encourage Bioware to drop this idea in any future games. Come on guys, get a date or something.

But here is the thing that I find surprising. In spite of a lot of these flaws, I’m probably going to play it again. Having gone through it as a good character and understanding everything, I want to go back and be a complete jerk to everyone. I think the goal will be to open up the credits section of the manual and each time someone dies in the game I will mark a name off of the list of those who contributed to this game. Eat shotgun pellets Quality Assurance guy Chris Corfe! You should have caught some of these flaws in the beta testing!

The really upsetting part about all of this is that the core storyline is fantastic. But it’s like the story writers just ran out of steam so the devs had to come up with all of this crap filler stuff to give you about 25-30 hours of gameplay. If the writers had gone back and thrown in a few more core missions, all could easily have been forgiven I think. The ending though obviously suggests a sequel would be possible in the future and I would hope so, provided of course some of the glaring problems with the game are addressed.

The combat system is just a more highly polished KoTOR and that is the type of thing that should be encouraged. You're now given the ability to have eight combat arts or defense skills up and ready on your hotbar so being able to toss creatures into the air or push them over a railing is quick and enjoyable. The only thing that was missing was an easier way to pause combat but given the pace of the combat and how brief most fights were, this was not an issue for me.

The problem with Mass Effect pertains to all the crap in the game that gets in the way of the overall story. It seems to me that the developers at Bioware realized that they needed to fill in gigabytes of space afforded to them on a DVD-ROM and rather than put it on there in some organized fashion that would contribute to the overall story, they just threw in whatever felt good at the time. To make matters worse, the inventory control system and squad management system actually are worse than what it was in Knights of the Old Republic.