Mass Effect (360) Review

I will be writing another review for Mass Effect including the Downloadable Content when I get it.

Let me start this off by saying that Bioware Shits Gold.

I don't think that the people at bioware know how to make a bad game, everything i've played from them lately has been some sort of amazing experience.

Furthermore I went into Mass Effect knowing that its the first game of a trilogy.

The real meat and potatoes of Mass Effect is the conversation system. Options pop up on the screen before the point where you say what you picked, but your choices are not directly what you choose. The way I figure it is you pick what you are thinking, and that determines what is said - which leads to some pretty awesome dialogue (especially in the case of 'evil' or 'threat' conversation choices).

The game takes place in like 2150, where earth found some crazyass ruins on mars and found some technology that allows you to manipulate the mass of objects thus allowing faster than light travel and creating some pretty cool other shit (guns with infinate ammo, more on that later). The term they use for this fantastic advanced technology (which by the way, everybody else in the universe already had, lolol gimp earth.) is the name of the game. ooooh clever.

You play as Commander (John or Jane) Shepard of the Human Systems Alliance. In Char creation you have tons of options for facial features (ala Oblivion, but without looking gay), Then you get to choose one of three possible backgrounds (growing up) and then one of three military career options (how youve acted so far in your career). These dont really determine shit other than conversational tidbits throughout the game, and some shitty little sidequest they throw in about halfway through.

You have like 8 possible classes, even though its all just a listing of 3 pureclasses and the hybrids between them. Solider (all guns), Biotic (psyonics with a different name, oooh.) and Tech (hacking and overloading and shit). How I played the game through I shouldve picked Soldier, because i didnt use the tech abilities for dick.

Its like RPG Halo, with conversations.

Controls exactly like halo, except third person and you can hug walls for cover (and pop out to shoot), you can pause time like in KOTOR, but only to pick special abilities to use, And there is a strong resemblance to KOTOR in the Good/Bad choices thing, very lightside-Darkside, only without lightsabres or making your guy look undead for being mean to random idiots.

The soundtrack is pretty good, alot of it was repeating in the games later hours, but it never really bothered me. The sounds never bothered me either, and the V/O was good throughout the game.

The overall storyline was not too terribly hard to follow, infact later in it became quite predictable, except a twist at the end that I never saw coming (Fight with Saren and the Result of the Conversation choice before it).

Mapping was fantastic in the storyline areas, the only flaw I saw was the shitty re-used generic buildings everywhere else in the game. It seems every single building outside of a populated storyline centric planet was a default cookie cutter facility.

The biggest drawback I noticed was the Mako, the Tank-like vehicle you use for all your planetary exploration needs. Vehicles in FPS's are fun if you throw them in occasionally and thats it, but the mako in mass effect is like, seriously 1/3rd of the total time played. I wouldve either cut this down or made the mako sections more like the storyline sections that involve the mako, a guantlet with your objective at the end, not endless driving across a barren planet looking for random bits of ore and occasional storyline shit.

My other big complaint is that I spent my entire game macking it to the human chick, just to have this easy blue whore show up later in the game, and she was the one i ended up fucking due to a single choice in a conversation. This pissed me off pretty good but i had already saved it after that point so there was no going back.

I'm very interested in seeing how the second mass effect picks up from the first, I assume it will read your savegame and use the choices you picked in the first one (who dies at the end, etc) and continue the story with that. the drawback there is what if you want to see the storyline with the gay dude living? well then you have to play the first one through again, sorry.
Hopefully there will be a questionnare type thing at char select where you can choose different choices for the first game, to effect the second games story.

The guys at Bioware put alot of thought into the backstory, there is seriously hours and hours of reading in the codex menu. Which just explains stupid shit like, how guns can have infinate ammo.. or why this one race hates this other race. There is such a deep wealth of knowledge behind it theres no wonder people have been jumping into it like its the new starwars.

Overall I give mass effect a 9 out of 10, Fantastic Game - but not perfect.

I seldom give out 10's though.

Total Damage? 520 Gamerpoints on my first playthrough, not farming any achievements. 50 hours (give or take)