Mass Effect

 

Mass Effect is a famous and innovative game from 2007 which is most well known for creating the 'dialogue wheel' system where conversations are dynamic and the player can steer them in certain ways according to the dialogue wheel.

I played it back in the day on xbox 360 but dont think I ever finished it, so now all these years later I've returned to try to finish it on the PC.

It takes place in a far future where space travel is commonplace and all sorts of different planets are colonized by cooperating and hostile humanlike species. Theres a main evil villian that you chase around the game trying to prevent from wiping out all of organic life or something like this. The plot is decent enough and sets the game up alright, though it can get quickly muddled and convoluted with all the different names and places you have to keep track of. At times it feels like its trying to 'muddy the waters to make it appear deep'  At some points youll be scratching your head wondering what the hell was just said because they namedropped like 12 different places and names and they all sound weird so youre like "wait whats that again? i forget"

So the game has you talking to npc's, A lot of npcs, navigating through this unique and innovative dialogue wheel where on the left side it usually goes deeper into the conversation, usually giving more side quests or extra objectives, and the right side of the wheel (especially bottom right) tries to cut the conversation short and get to the point. I really appreciate how theres options to get the point as fast as possible and spend little time conversing to try to get back to the action, this usually makes your character seem like a tryhard badass Duke Nukem type where he always says cocky and arrogant responses like "So what? Whats your point"  "Get to the point"  "I dont care hurry up"  which I found pretty funny, because yeah I'm not someone who really cares that much about story or plots or writing in video games, i just want action  and mechanics. So if youre like me, then you dont have to spend dozens of minutes in some boring conversation if you dont want to.
 
The combat consists of picking two squad members at the start of each outing, which is determined sort of randomly and sporadically, sometimes when you travel between areas a squad selection screen pops up and you can choose two out of 8 or so possible members. Your squad members can either be fully combat focused, or specialize in 'tech' or 'biotics' which is sort of like magic abilities, but also helps you to open certain loot chests, and then you embark on the mission. The squad members work well enough with decent AI, and when they die in battle they stay dead unless you use an ability to revive them, or until the combat is over then they just stand up and go about as normal.

The actual gunplay from the players perspective is just OK, its pretty minimal, you have only a few gun categories: shotgun, sniper, pistol, assault rifle. You can pull each out them out at any time, and you obtain loot which upgrades the basic stats in these categories. I mostly used the Shotgun category the whole game, because it did sufficient damage without needing a lot of levels invested into it, and also the sound effect wasnt as annoying as assault rifle, and sniper is obviously too annoying to use always with the zoom in shaking scope, and who cares about pistols? So really the game basically has like one viable main weapon, which is pretty disappointing.
There is no reloading or ammo collecting or anything, every weapon instead uses a overheating system, so you have to pace your shots or your weapon overheats and you have to wait. This has a certain sort of enjoyable feel to it, where you have to get into a rhythm of pacing your shots, but its also less satisfying and cool than actually using guns that have to reload and managing your ammo.
Choosing new weapon upgrades and armor is really basic too, you just randomly collect a bunch of different guns, but really its just a reskin of the same gun with different stats, then you open up your equipment screen and just equip the gun that has the highest damage number, thats it , really. You can add some attachments to them, which do things like slightly increase cooldown recovery or damage, but nothing crazy. You can equip different armors too, which makes you a lot tankier and makes your character look visually different, but its pretty basic mechanically.

Also, the camera perspective while shooting is kind of disappointing. You basically cant even see the weapon you're using, all you can see is your shoulder, its just a bad camera angle , i dont know why they didnt tilt it over to the side a bit more so you can actually see your gun, it makes the combat a little less satisfying and enjoyable where you just stare at your guys back the whole time instead of looking at what your gun is doing.

Theres all sorts of various enemies, and throughout the game it does introduce lots of new types, and some of the enemy AI is seriously menacing and brutal that just sprint towards you and beat your face in with melee, so this is where the ability system comes into play. You press a button and it brings up all these different perks you can use, it slows down the game world while you choose, and you can choose things like instantly reviving your squad, boosting your shields or health, stuff like that. Nothing crazy, because I choose to play the most typical Soldier brute class possible, which is the default class. Its odd how at the beginning of the game theres an option to create your own class, but I can't see myself doing that, as the games promotional material , box art, and all advertisements are about John Shepard, just seems out of place to not play as him.

So the combat is just alright, there is a lot of it. I beat the game in only 13 hours, I'd say maybe 7 of those hours were pure combat, and the rest were a mix of dialogue and cutscenes, or exploring.

Some of the worst problems and annoyances with the game is the level design at times, and lack of coherent objective markers and indications of where to go.
There is no marker helping you know where to go, so you have to constantly keep opening the pause menu and checking your journal, then going into the map and setting custom waypoints of where you think you might have to go.

 Sometimes there are some icons helping steer you in the right way, but they dont actually disappear when you arrive at the location, so it can be confusing to tell if youve already done something or not. This is a frequent annoyance and really slows the pacing of the game down just constantly looking at your journal and trying to figure out where it wants you to go next, especially because sometimes it will be very vague and tell you to travel to an entire different galaxy, where you can enter 6 different planets, and youre suppose to just aimlessly travel around random planets until you find the one that has the objective you need. It seemed that way atleast, but usually if you try to follow the journal you'll be in the right place, but it wont really seem like it. Youll be asking yourself "Is this where I'm suppose to be? I cant tell if this is a side quest or not, am i wasting my time? Is there anything even here? And then after wandering around for 15 mins you find out yeah its the right spot.

Other really bad annoyances are ELEVATORS. There are some levels that are quite literally just mazes of elevators. You walk through generic metallic box corridor sections that all look exactly the same, then at the end is an elevator where you have to sit in it for 30 seconds , just to find out it was the wrong elevator, go back down another 30 seconds, walk around the maze of corridors that all look the same to take another elevator, realize THAT was the wrong elevator, REPEAT ...  sometimes there can be like 6 elevators in one area and you have to just walk around in circles taking each one over and over until you find the right one to progress. Totally boring and frustrating.

There is quite a bit of vehicle sections in the game too, you will go through these planets on a vehicle called a Mako which is a sort of APC style military vehicle with rockets and machine guns, it has a fun physics based boost jetpack button that I found fun to dick around with, but these sections mainly comprise driving around completely empty, barren landscapes, trying to find the path where you need to go, driving past most enemies, sometimes stopping to destroy turrets and enemies blocking your path. Not the most exciting part of the game, and honestly the game probably would have been better with less of these vehicle sections. Sort of filler.

Oh yeah, and the save system can be a real drag. It sort of arbitrarily allows you to save whenever you want, and you have to keep remembering to check the pause menu to see if you can save, because if you forget to save you can easily lose 20 mins of progress and have to repeat some gigantic section again just because you got one hit by a stray rocket.

The pacing in the game is pretty decent and addictive, though. At first I was worried the game would just be a boring 'talking simulator' but like I said, luckily you can just ignore all side quests (which I did) and you can pick all the dialogue options that speed up the conversations while acting like some kind of duke nukem badass, then you just constantly go straight into the action. Your squad members always have something to say, and there are constant cutscenes that dont really get in the way, but they add depth and atmosphere to your objectives. A lot of the writing and story is based upon the interaction between Humans and other intelligent species, with themes of racism  or 'speciesism' quite frequent, politics, and trying to make moral decisions constantly with a 'paragon' and 'renegade' morality system, although I never realy noticed what that system did. The constant moral choices and quality of writing made it worth it to sit through the constant cutscenes and dialogue choices.

There area a decent variety in locations and places you explore, theres a hub style world with all sorts of bars and optional NPCs to talk to, you can fly around freely to all sorts of different galaxies and planets which is admittedly pretty confusing and kinda feels pointless, you go from wintery planets to indoors sci-fi places to weird zombie alien lairs and orange red planets, theres even a planet thats like a giant beach water level. Theres no level that really stands out or is very memorable, and it is all quite generic as actual levels, but there is some variety to keep you interested atleast.

The game has a RPG stat system, where you will be frequently getting levels just by killing enemies and completing objectives, the stat system is quite basic but also has enough depth to not be trivial, and its not too complex where its a chore to interact with and worry that youll ruin your character. For me, I choose to just maximize all the health and armor based upgrades first, ignoring all the speech options because I'm more interested in combat, and then after I maxed all the health upgrades, to then focus on Shotgun and damage upgrades. It worked quite well, and the difficulty of the game was just right, but towards the end I was feeling pretty overpowered with almost everything I wanted maxed out, even despite ignoring ALL side quests. Your squad members level up too, though it seems like you have no influence over what they get, they just automatically level and get new abilities they can use.

The game does have a certain level of freedom and multiple ways to tackle objectives, but if youre just here for a solid pure third person shooter, its not really great for it. If you want to play like I did, and just skip most of the side quests and optional content and go straight for the action, the just average core combat mechanics and lack of proper navigation, the elevators and sometimes bad level design,  makes the game just a decent experience. At least I beat it fairly quickly, in only 12 hours, so its not overly long or gets to the point of being past its welcome, and the story does have a lot of interesting twists and turns and memorable characters and some boss fights, halfway through the game it starts to introduce the standard zombie trope which I found mildly entertaining and fun, but really it feels like this game is just the baseline of what would later be enhanced and improved upon in future Mass Effect games, I would assume. The dialogue and writing is pretty good, for the most part, if youre the kind of person that cares about that in video games then theres a lot there for you, the facial animations and model details are still very impressive for a 2007 game, its ahead of its time for sure I think. But again, im not really the kind of person that really cares about stories or writing in video games anymore... but even still, for me I did have a certain level of entertainment with all the dialogue, and when I got tired of it there was always an option for me to just hurry up with it without feeling like I'm ruining the experience.  

Also, the game is probably better with a controller and was more designed with that in mind. By default, on the Steam version, it lacks controller support, but the files of the exact same controller interface and mechanics as the console versions are still in the game, and there is a mod that enables that feature again, so I used that for the whole game, and the controls are pretty good and intuitive, no complaints with the controls really, a few nitpicks with the cover system and accidentally pressing dialogue options when Im trying to skip the previous one, or constantly accidentally talking to my squad members when I was trying to sprint, but nothing major.  I think the other Mass Effect games in the series are going to be an improvement on this first game, this first one seems to just set up the foundation but doesn't really refine and nail the combat mechanics.

6/10