Unlike Bioshock and a few other modern console ports, Mass Effect does not support a gamepad, so I had to go
with mouse and keyboard, which however worked quite fine, as the UI of
Mass Effect has been changed quite a bit to work well with mouse and
keyboard.
The game puts you in the shoes of Shepard on a quest
to save the galaxy. RPG typical you can create a custom character at
the start of the game and as always I chosed to pretty much skip that
step and go with one of the provided default character. I never quite
understood what the point is of having the choice happen before the
game and not actually in the game itself, as is for example the case in
Gothic 2. Having to make a choice about your characters abilites before
the game even starts is not only time consuming and annoying it also
forces you to make descisions about powers and abilities that you have
no idea about how they will influence story and gameplay. Its bad game
design that has its place in western RPGs for way to long and I would
strongly prefer it if games would just skip it and leave customization
to the gameplay itself.
Once beyond the character creation the
game actually starts and luckily leaves most of other RPG issues aside.
The fighting in Mass Effect is not just third person shooter like, its
pretty much a straight third person shooter, including cover mechanic
and tactical commands for your squad members and it plays suprisingly
well. The fighting is also seamlessly inegrated into your normal
gameplay, so you can pull your weapon whenever you like.
Aside
from walking on foot you also have a vehicle at your disposal, which
seems to be a 3D version of that thing you drove in Moon Patrol, with
which you do exploration on other planets. Driving around in the Mako
is a little less perfect then the shooting, as that vehicle seems to be
pretty much weightless and it bounces around like crazy when you hit an
obstacle, but it does its job very well of giving the game some varity
and scale.
While all that driving around and shooting is lots of
fun, the game however has some really annoying problems with the way it
handles death. The first one is that you can die really quickly in this
game, some death are instant one-hit kills, if you don't dodge a blast
you are dead. Which by itself wouldn't be that bad, but combined with
the lack of proper auto-save, unskipable cutscenes and a terribly long
death animation slowmo can get extremely annoying. The game also does
not allow saving while in the mid of a fight. So you are basically
stuck with retrying the same fight over and over again till you figured
out what kills you and how to avoid it. The good thing however is that
you can toggle the games difficulty at any time, thus basically
reducing the one-hit kills to simple shots that destroy most of your
shields, but let you life, thus giving you the needed time to properly
plan the attack and evasion. On the "Casual" setting the game is really
easy and those issues pretty much never arrive, but on the higher
difficulty they can be pretty much game breakers.
The dialogs
are another huge part of this game. Mass Effect features an innovative
dialog wheel that along with great character art gives the game a
cinematic feel. The dialog wheel unlike normal dialog selection always
pops up before the last line of dialog has ended, so you can smoothly
chain dialog together without interruption. Similar to Kotor the dialog
in Mass Effect features good, neutral, evil choices for dialog, which
happen to be mapped to the top and bottom part of the wheel and thus
allows easy selection without convusion.
The dialog wheel is
however not without problems. One small issue is that there is a
noticable disconnect between what your character says and what is
displayed as choice on the wheel. Due to the good/neutral/evil answers
that is never really a practical problem, but it often feels
unnecessarily confusing. Another issue is that already selected dialog
options aren't removed from the list of available selection, thus
leading to accidental repetitions of dialog, made worse by the lack of
a proper skip button. You can skip dialog by pressing space, but as
space also happens to trigger the next dialog line you might end up
accidentially selecting an option instead of skipping dialog, it would
have helped if those two functions would be on separate keys.
The
bigger problem however is the dialog itself. The good/evil separation
causes the dialog to always be flat and predicable, you hardly ever
need to chose an answer, instead you just go with the default depending
on if you play good or evil. The dialog also just goes a little to
smooth, if you select the good answer, the result will pretty much
always be good, unexpected consequences just never happen in the whole
game. The dialog also happens to be a little to exposatory for its own
good, you can asks almost every character about their backstory, the
universe and everything and they will happily chatter along. But while
you might gain some information that way, thats just not how dialog
should work, you are talking to a character after all not an
encyclopedia.
Another big issue with the dialog system is that
the choices you have available are the result of your RPG stats, if you
don't have invested any points in Charm, you won't have a certain
answer available. That doesn't sound so bad by itself, but it caused
the game to basically run into a brick wall for me a few times, when
the lack of choice means that you can't actually say what you want to
say and the dialog thus gets into a loop. There was a key scene in the
game where I had to basically had to decide about the life or death of
an NPC and the lack of choices predetermined the outcome for no good
reason. This was hugely annoying and frustrating. Luckily I had a few
level points left, could use an earlier save and invest everything in
Charm and thus go past that point with a satisfying selection, but it
was a huge immersion breaker non the less and feelt just utterly
arbitary dialog restriction. Similar issues happened before a few
times, but luckily after having maxed out Charme those issues where
completly gone and the dialog become much more enjoyable.
In
terms of overall story the game is a bit of a mixed back, it starts out
interesting and it ends in a great final, but what happens inbetween
feels a little abitary and disconnected. There are to many quests that
have little to do with the main plot and feel like a waste of the
characters time. A story that basically consists of a race against time
just isn't the best place to put random side quests and exploration
into.
While the above might all sound quite negative, my final
take on the game is however pretty much nothing but positive. The game
picks bits and pieces from the RPG genre, Gears of War, Full Spectrum
Warrior, Moon Patrol, Star Control 2 and plenty of more and combines
them into and absolutely awesome epic space adventure game. For all the
faults that the game has, there are simple enough workarounds that lets
you enjoy the game to its fullest. The dialog might not always be as
gripping and interesting as in the best adventure games out there, but
thanks to the terrific character art and voice acting it is still way
more interesting then your average RPG. Not each piece might be the
best you can find in its genre, but the simple fact is that there just
isn't anything that combines as much as Mass Effect does. There just
isn't another shooter around that also gives you great dialog and free
space exploration.
My first play through the game took around
16h, focusing pretty much only on the main quest and that was fun
enough, but the game really truely gripped me when I went back and sank
another 10h into it doing each and every side quest I could find. The
combination of old school exploration gameplay with modern day shooting
and dialog is simply something that absolutely clicked for me and I
didn't have that much fun with any game in quite a long long while.
Update:
I played through the game now again for a second time, this time
choosing the adapt class instead of soldier and going mostly with evil
choices in dialog instead of the good ones. Overall it doesn't really
change much, most of the quests you get stay exactly the same and even
if you reject a quest in the dialog you will often still get it into
your journal, as the game doesn't really allow you to be a bad guy.
Some of the adapt powers seem kind of useless, lifting hardly ever
worked and stasis seemed pointless, throw and singularity on the other
side, when leveled up to the max, could be kind of fun. The assault
rifle however continued to work best in fights. I however did discover
a tiny few quests that I have missed the first time around and I
learned that the licenses you can buy in shops are actually useful, as
they increase how many grenade and medigels you can carry. On my first
play through I pretty much completly ignored the shops and thus
licenses. The shops themselves however still feel overall useless,
aside from the licenses there really is never anything interesting to
buy, as the gear you will find in random container is good enough and
gear in shops always way to expensive.
