I've recently finished playing Mass Effect on the Xbox 360 after playing through it about 1 and 1/2 times through on the PC. First of all let me tell you right now if you have a decent PC you will want to play this on that instead of the 360 for reasons I will explain. This is actually my first review of a game so I'm going to take the easy route and list the good things about the game, then the things that could use some improvement. I'm not going to set up the story pretty much at all because there are a multitude of different ways you could read up on the plot of the game, but I will tell you the game is a third person shooter/RPG that take place about 100 years in the future.
The Good
-The universe is set up with such devotion that almost every single planet in the game has a detailed description including temperature, distance from the sun, a small bit of history, etc.
-There are so many codex to read explaining alien races, technology, planets, and so many other things that you will start to believe this world could actually exist someday.
-The game almost never takes you out of the world for loading screens. The only times it does are when you are traveling to a different planet and you get a 5 second loading screen that features the Normandy either hitting a mass relay (the devices used for very long distance travel), or traveling at light speed so even when watching a short loading screen you always feel like you are in the game. Smaller places such as the citadel which is the "main city" in a way, have elevator rides instead of loading screens. Some people would complain about this and say it detracts from the game, but personally I would rather have a 20 second elevator ride with a few instances of interesting dialogue between party members, or a short radio news segment then a 20 second loading screen. This way it never takes you out of the world and you actually feel you are traveling to a different part of the city. Just a quick note that one of my favorite loading screens actually seems to add to the world. This is the loading segment when you enter/ leave a planet and while entering the Normandy again, the ship does a cool little scan effect and "decontaminates you". It's small little touches like this that make you love the world even more.
-The characters in the game are great. From a charismatic Commander Shepard which you can create yourself, to a pissed off scary looking Wrex. The characters all have interesting back stories and you learn more and more about them as the game goes on. To be honest with you the characters I least cared for in the game were the two human party members you get very early on in the game; Ashley and Kaiden, but I'll let you decide for yourself which ones you like.
-The voice acting is quite good all the way through the game. I'm not sure if Liara has a bad voice acter though, since I think they way she talks just might be part of the character. Bad voice acting or part of the character, it still works either way for me and suits her character.
-The shooting and cover mechanics are decent, but could have used much more polish or tweaking to make them feel more satisfying. They are alright for what they are though.
-The RPG elements in the game are one of my favorite parts and I hope Mass Effect 3 (which is not out at the time of writing this) brings back some of the RPG feel of this game. Every time you level in the game you get a couple points to put into biotic powers which are pretty much the force in this game. The powers are very fun to use and spice up some otherwise not so exciting combat. You can also put points into weapon efficiency, health, and a variety of other things. You'll want to try and keep a balanced party by having a character who excels in biotics, one who is good at tech, and one who is great with guns. Although having a well balanced party will probably make things a bit easier, it is not at all necessary and really you can just roll with your favorite characters if you wish.
-The story is interesting and will make you want to keep going all the way through to the end, even if you are missing side missions along the way because you want to move on so badly.
-The weapon attachments are a good addition to the game. Got a shotgun that overheats to quickly? Slap a heatsink on it. Want even more power out of it? Put a rail system on it, but watch out because the heat will rise dramatically.
-I like the pause system the game has when choosing to use a power or switch a weapon. It make it feel more RPG like when you can pause the game dead in its tracks and carefully think about your next move. Many times after playing this game I tried pausing the game in other third person shooters to think about what I was going to do next only to accidentally throw a grenade or something because that system doesn't exist.
-I've saved the best for last; the dialogue system. Basically every time there is dialogue in the game you get a small wheel in the bottom of the screen. Each part of the wheel has different questions/responses to what was just said. You can either learn more about what is being talked about by choosing an option on the left side of the wheel, or move the conversation forward by choosing one on the right side. Choices can also have paragon (good) or renegade (bad-ish) points tagged to them which lets you build up more and more points on either side. At time there will be paragon or renegade only choices you can pick from the dialogue wheel which are highlighted in either blue or red, You must have enough points accumulated in either one to choose the option or it will be greyed out.
The Bad
-So here's the part where I recommend the PC version of the game. This game has pretty horrible technical issues; the biggest of which is the frame rate. I think the game must run anywhere from about 25 fps and below at all time which is not great. There are also so many even worse hiccups in the frame rate you'll begin to think something is wrong with your 360. The PC version of the game can pretty much eliminate this problem if you have a good enough PC, but then again the game is not optimized very well at all and you'll need a pretty decent PC to get a solid 60 fps (if that's what you're aiming for).
-The textures are pretty bad at times which is most noticeable when looking at other people's clothes. They will look very pixelated even in dialogue where you will be staring at them close up for an extended period of time. The textures also load in quite slowly when entering a new area, or sometimes just randomly (unreal engine yaaay).
-The check pointing system need to save more often when you are doing side missions. You will have to manually save often if you don't want to lose a ton of progress when you die (which will probably happen often when first starting out). The one most memorable situation of this is when I was doing a side mission on Luna. The mission has three bunkers you have to clear out and after each one the game does not autosave for some stupid reason so I would keep forgetting to save, clear out and entire bunker, die, and have to restart the entire thing.
-The planet exploration can be both good and bad. It's a good thing that you can explore a variety of different planets, and the planets themselves look great; but at the same time it is very boring driving around in the Mako which handles very poorly. and many of the planets are just huge barren wastelands with different textures plopped onto them. There are only about 3 different things you can do on a planet which include mining, tackling side missions which are marked as ! on your map, or searching for anomalies which are marked with a ?. None of these things are very interesting.
-Not all the side missions in the game are bad, but the ones that involve you going to a planet and entering a bunker are very repetitive and dull. The bunkers you enter for every side mission in the game look almost identical. You will see the same building layout for 10-20 side missions and it makes the worlds feel like they are just palette swaps and no effort was put into the side missions.
-Early on in the game on normal difficulty I was having problems with the combat. You would thing that you would want to take cover during a fight so you will not get shot right? But when you take cover, most enemies will just rush you and actually walk behind you past your cover and start shooting you in the back. You will then proceed to die in about 2 shots for some reason. Either the game should give you much more health which isn't really a problem later in the game when you get shield and health upgrades, or the cover system should be much better. The main problem is it is hard to leave and enter cover because there is no dedicated button for it. All you do to enter cover is walk up to an object and hope to god Shepard will stick to it and take cover. If you want to take cover behind an object lower than yourself, you have manually crouch and then take cover which can be very frustrating in intense combat. Once you are in cover you have to hold a different direction on the stick for about 5 seconds before you will actually leave the cover, hence the problem I was having above. If I were able to leave cover much faster it wouldn't have been so much of a problem.
-Many times the choices in the dialogue system will just be put there to let you click a button and never actually impact the conversation at all. It gives an illusion of choice which is not that bad of a thing on a first playthrough, but after that you will see that picking a different choice many times will have the same outcome, possibly even the same dialogue lots of the time. That being said there are still many real choices to be had.
-The UI and menus are not very well designed. This is one more thing that the PC version of the game fixes quite a bit. Managing the hundreds of weapons and armor you are going to get is not very well set up and can take a while sometimes. That being said I didn't have as much of a problem with it as others did.
-Your squadmates are not the brightest bunch. Many times they will just get themselves killed within 10 seconds of a fight. There is not really a way to get them to take cover as you can't (to my knowledge) order your squadmates individually. You can either tell them to both go here, follow, or stop. You can also tell them to switch weapons or use a power on a target at any given time which is a plus I guess. Once again another thing the PC version makes much better than the 360 version, allowing you to individually order sqaudmates to different locations.
Overall Mass Effect is a great game that should at least be experienced by all for the new things it brings to the table, even if the game has a few issues on he technical and UI side of things. You will enjoy the setting, story, characters, and maybe even a little combat depending on your tastes. If you can get a hold of the PC versions I would recommend it instead. It eliminates lots of the problems the 360 version has with better loading, framerate, UI, and arguably controls. Overall I would probably give the PC version a 4/5 stars.
