Game Review: Mass Effect

I guess the fact that I finally played Mass Effect means I've given up my quixotic struggle against DRM software.  I'll write about that later, but I'd heard a lot of good things about the game and my curiosity finally got the best of me.

I feel conflicted about reviewing it and I'm not sure where to start.  On the one hand, it's one of the slickest, smartest, best-written role-playing games I've seen.  On the other, the gameplay is mediocre and needlessly padded, and in fact about a quarter of the way in I turned the difficulty down to the minimum so I could sleepwalk through the combat sequences and get to the next part of the story.

The setup is familiar to anybody who's read or seen much science-fiction: It's two hundred years in the future, and humanity is a relative newcomer to the galactic community.  The Alliance, a coalition of human countries and colonies, is sort of a junior member of an interstellar federation called the Citadel Council, which has governed a large portion of the galaxy for millennia.  You play Shepard, an elite human soldier, who becomes the first human candidate for the Spectres, the Council's covert law enforcement agency.  Your first assignment, an investigation into the theft of an archaeological relic, leads first to the discovery of corruption within the Council, and then, of course, to a terrible secret which threatens all species.

The basic idea is nothing new, of course, but it's very well executed.  The alien races have interesting differences in psychology, from the Salarians, who think and act very quickly but have a lifespan of only forty years, to the Krogans, a recently-uplifted race from a harsh world who can't manage to overcome their aggressive instincts even though they know it will destroy them.  The attention to detail and the amount of thought put into the races and their backstories is much deeper than you usually see in a game like this, and by the end your in-game encyclopedia is full of interesting articles about interstellar politics, warfare, and history, all very plausible and thoughtful.  This is the first time I've seen a game really explore the effect of different biologies and especially reproductive strategies on an alien culture, and as a geek I was very happy to see words like "haplodiploid" in a video game.

Over the course of the game you visit many different solar systems and planets, each with its own short description and a few tidbits of galactic history that have taken place nearby.  Just as with the alien cultures, it was nice to read some interesting backstory and science (most good, some questionable), about all the planets in the game universe.

But now I have to take off my fanboy hat, because "read about them" is all you can do.  The many encyclopedia articles about the nature of space combat have no relevance to the game itself; they exist only to provide backstory, and to explain what you see in a few cutscenes.  The planetary descriptions, while interesting, are only there to establish what type of scenery your current location sports.  In short, the gameplay can't live up to the excellent setting they've created.

The game engine is similar to Bioware's previous roleplaying games, especially Knights of the Old Republic.  Unlike with Dead Space, I didn't have a problem with the third-person perspective here, mainly because the emphasis is on exploration and conversation rather than twitch-based fighting.  The engine is fine for seeing the sights and talking to characters, but for combat I thought it was pretty lackluster.  Fighting takes place in real time, which, despite the ability to pause and significant auto-aiming help, wasn't really a great fit for a game like this; I found it overwhelming and kept wishing for the turn-based system of KotOR, where you could take your time and plan out your moves in combat.  Like I said up above, I quickly came to regard the combat system as an annoying interlude between chapters of the story, and did my best to skip it.

But, sadly, the lackluster combat system isn't even the game's biggest flaw.  That honor goes to the endless repetition and padding the game inflicts upon the player, both in terms of gameplay and scenery.  Only a half dozen locations in the game are fully fleshed-out; the vast majority of planets are side quests which involve driving around large expanses of (admittedly cool-looking) fractal landscape until you find your objective, then disembarking and entering one of five or so prefabricated building maps ("Oh look, another one of those buildings where I have to go in that door to the right and then up the stairs!"), shooting a few enemies, collecting some loot, and then maybe finding a terminal or a data disc to complete your assignment.  Which is a shame, because the mini-stories that accompany the side missions are occasionally intriguing, and could've been pretty cool if they were given more attention.  A handful of the side quests have somewhat better-developed set pieces, which unfortunately only underscores the problem, and makes you realize what you're missing.

Still, overall the game is well worth playing, with an interesting story, a setting that will appeal to space geeks like myself in particular, and some great visuals along the way.  If the combat system is a bit on the dull side, well, there are worse things than a game that's not all about shooting stuff.  The game's only real unforgivable sin is all the padding, and Bioware loses 20 Paragon points for that.