Having just finished playing through Mass Effect, I think this is one of the greatest video games I’ve ever played. When I played through that game, it is startling how big this game is, yet how awesome the experience is. When it comes to storytelling, scale, characterization and role-playing, I don’t think I’ve played anything better than Mass Effect.
With all that hyperbole said, Mass Effect is not a perfect game. It has a number of aspects to it that while not game-breaking, stand out like a sore thumb because of how awesome the rest of the package is. I’ve heard that all of this is addressed in Mass Effect 2, which makes me that much more excited for the sequel.
I’ll start with the big complaint from me: terrible auto-save. Manual saving in this game is awesome, allowing you to save at any point except for when you’re in combat, but the game will rarely ever auto-save, especially when you need it most or think it should. There were a few times where I played multiple side-missions or completed a number of steps in a long main mission and I died, only to return to my last manual save…which could have been hours ago. I lost between 2-3 hours of my game because I didn’t save. When you discover this, you then get save-crazy. The game keeps track of your play time and the number of saves you make, and I ended up saving manually once every 11 minutes over 22 hours of game time. That’s ridiculous.
Before I started playing Mass Effect, I had heard a number of complaints about driving the Mako. Now I understand first hand why it sucks and has been completely removed from the second game. Driving it around is an absolute nightmare. The left stick handles the gas and what direction you’re driving in, and the right stick controls centering the camera and aiming the turret. The problem is, the direction you’re driving in is directly affected by the orientation of the camera. When you steer left, the camera doesn’t center itself with the rear of your Mako. Instead, the camera stays the same and you see your car driving left and have no idea what’s in front of the vehicle. At that point, you then have to use the right stick to adjust the camera, but then this also then changes the direction your Mako is going because the camera is now in a different position. At first, it is absolutely maddening. By the end of the game, I sort of got a handle on it, but driving the Mako was never fun. If you stick to the main story, you won’t have to endure much of it. However, if you want to do all the side-missions, be prepared to spend a lot of time in that Mako.
Speaking of side missions, they vary wildly in quality. It didn’t feel like Borderlands, where side-missions felt as significant as the main missions, but that’s fine. My problem was the number of cookie-cutter side-missions in the game. For every great side quest that required you to do something cool (such as solve everything through conversation), are two side quests that all play out exactly the same. You start out landing on an uncharted planet, you drive around to the marked points on the map, then complete whatever objective there is to do in the mine or station. In all the side missions, the mines or stations are built exactly the same way, leading to a sense of deja vu. For a game as large as Mass Effect, I can see why they had to recycle geometry, but I’d rather they just cut out the repetitive side missions and stick with what’s great.
Even if you’re only watching someone play Mass Effect, you can see some of the game’s technical shortcomings. The framerate is not steady, and will drop to almost 0 frames a second when things get really nuts. The game suffers from texture pop-in that should be familiar to anyone that’s played any Unreal Engine game, such as the Gears of War series. To mask loading, you and your team will spend a lot of time standing in elevators. I understand that BioWare didn’t want to take players out with a loading screen, but it’s even more jarring when you’re waiting in an elevator for the 100th time, while your characters stand perfectly still and share the same dialogue they had 10 minutes before. The weirdest technical shortcoming the game has is that it will actually stop the game mid-action to load the next area of the game, which is extremely jarring.
One more thing I needed to criticize Mass Effect for before I wrap this up. For all the things Mass Effect does to make you feel like you’re in a living, breathing world, the times when you realize it’s a video game kind of put a damper on things. For all the feelings I felt when I consummated my relationship with Liara and similarly heavy moments, there were just as many moments where poor stage direction and robotic moments took away from the realism. Most dialogues involve nothing more than two people standing perfectly still talking to each other, which other games have done much better since.
All things considered, these are gripes that shouldn’t deter you from playing Mass Effect. I knew most of these criticism coming into this game, which was part of the reason I held out so long. But with what BioWare got right in this game, it’s one of the best games I’ve ever played. Everyone says Mass Effect 2 is notably better than the first, so my expectations of it are sky-high now that I’ve seen the light that is Mass Effect.
In Third Person 