Game : Mass Effect
Creator: Bioware

 

Mmm… what to say about Mass Effect? Well, it’s the first installment in a supposed trilogy by one of my favorite studios, Bioware. I became infatuated with them after playing Jade Empire, so understandably, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on their latest action-RPG.

The scene is set in space, where you start off on one of humanity’s newest spaceships, and through a series of unfortunate events, you become the captain and it is up to you to save the rest of the universe. Ok, ok it isn’t entirely as clichéd as that, you get to man a crew of multiple alien races and you can choose only two to leave the ship with you each time to go shoot at bad-guys. You get to upgrade the stats of your character as you gain experience and one thing which I am thankful for, was that when one person on your crew gets some extra experience points, everybody gets. This ensures that you don’t have one character that always stays on the ship, and when all the others reach level 10 you don’t just end up forgetting about him.

Some of the worlds are beautifully rendered, while others are just copied and pasted and given different name

s. What for me shows their dedication, is that they did go through the trouble of writing a short background story for each planet that you can visit. The combat is fun, the AI is pretty good and although they did have a tendency to run towards me and try to shoot at me whilst standing next to me, I did like the fact that when you kill somebody, you immediately receive all the weapons and armor that they had, even if you sniped them from half a mile away. I loved being immersed in this altered universe, but I kept being pulled out of it every time I could see the programming at work.

For instance, at the beginning of the game you start up with the lousiest weapons and armour, and no chance of randomly finding a super cool pistol in a crate, but by the end they seemed to be in every locker and trash can that I bumped into. Another one, was one of the smaller side missions where some enemies built themselves bases on four different planets and any one of those could be the main base, but no matter in which order you took the planets, the main base was always on the last planet.

I also have the same problem with Mass Effect that I tend to have with soap-operas, where you always have the one bad guy that is so obscenely evil for no apparent reason. In Mass Effect when you enquire about what motives the bad guys have for wanting to end all civilization in the known universe, all you get is a resounding: “Our minds cannot begin to comprehend the motives of these creatures”, and that my friend is just plain laziness on the programmers’ side! They could at least have made up something like: “the bad guys really want all of you dead, because at the beginning of your civilization, space travel made it possible for your race to steal their secrets of coffee-making and they swore revenge ever since”. I would be happy with a reason like that, albeit petty, it is still better than theirs. Alas, these are just minor bumps in an altogether smooth ride from start to finish, with some voice acting by Seth Green in the middle.

Mass Effect is a fun RPG that accomplishes exactly what games are supposed to and that is escapism. It also taught me something, and that is:  when you have a moral choice system in a game, always choose evil! I don’t know why, but I always feel compelled to play the nice guy in these games,  since I actually feel sorry for the disjointed 1’s and 0’s that appear on my monitor. I completed the campaign on good, and was dismayed when I saw a video on youtube of how cool the evil option is.

I also made the mistake of playing the game in front of my girlfriend, and she remarked that she didn’t understand why the women in the game couldn’t wear more stylish combat armor. So there’s a tip for you: if you have a girlfriend, let her go play The Sims, while you rocket off to go save the universe, but remember to be badass about it!

 

Reviewed by:

General Malfeasance