With everyone SWTOR’ing it up lately, myself included until just recently, I had gotten a craving to play one of BioWare’s more recent RPGs. As great as SWTOR is, I have little motivation to play it. I wrote up a whole post about that last week, and I decided earlier to cancel now and return around March/April. Yes, I know the post contradicts that – I ended it saying I’d be giving SWTOR another month now, but that’s not going to happen. Instead, I have decided to play Mass Effect 1 & 2 in preparation for Mass Effect 3, which is coming out early March!
As much as I love BioWare RPGs, I don’t think I’ve ever finished one, until now. I snagged Mass Effect for PC a few years back when it was on sale at some point, and played it up to the part where you first get to the Citadel. I pretty much stopped playing it at that point for some other games, and then my hard drive died. So, that was the end of that. I haven’t tried getting back into it until just recently, and man, am I glad I did.
I just finished the game literally less than an hour ago. I think my total time was somewhere around 16.5 hours, pretty low since I didn’t really bother with many of the side missions, something I really regret. Like Fallout 3, once you complete the final mission, there’s no going back, unless you re-load an older save of course. I actually thought the game would be a lot longer than it was, but overall it was paced very well and I’m all for good pacing over unnecessarily long games that just drag on just for the sake of being longer.
So, how’s the game? Well, for the most part, I really enjoyed it. The story has a heavy theme of discovery and mystery, which works really well because you’re in space, after all. Also worth noting, because it continues those themes, is the soundtrack of this game. It is without a doubt one of my all time favorite video game soundtracks. For the most part, all the tracks are very subtle, but they work so well in conveying the overall feel of the game. I remember seeing Tron: Legacy in theatres and thinking to myself, “Wow, this reminds me so much of Mass Effect!” And it still does, the club environments especially in both Tron and Mass Effect both evoke a lot of similarities, and I’m a big fan of both their soundtracks. But that’s enough about the music. How does shooting at stuff feel?
At first, even having played Mass Effect previously, the general feel of the combat felt very odd to me. I can’t really place my finger on it, but I think it’s the way cover works, as well as the behavior of the AI in the game – which both just feel “off.” The cover doesn’t always work, sometimes when I would take cover Shepard would still have his torso sticking out, instead of automatically crouching. I’d have to toggle crouch myself, but then I wouldn’t be able to pop in and out of cover for some reason. And then there’s the AI on both sides of combat, which is pretty poor overall. My allies would often stand around in the open, just taking shots without really giving a damn. That of course, meant frequent incapacitations for my teammates, which is a little bothersome. Enemy AI would often do the same thing, except totally fail to interpret anything that was going on, as if they were blind. This of course, was a lot more humorous than frustrating.
I picked the infiltrator class, which is pretty much based around heavy use of the pistols and sniper rifles. Although I had originally planned to do a lot of sniping, I ended up rolling with the pistols most of the time. You get this ability called marksman where your gun basically goes into rapid-fire mode, which turns your pistol into basically a sub-machine gun. There’s a cooldown on the ability, and it doesn’t last that long, but it made the combat a lot more interesting. It did feel odd running around the whole game with an assault rifle and shotgun on my back that I could never use, though. Still, I enjoyed the infiltrator, but will most likely be playing something completely different for Mass Effect 2 as well as 3.
I can’t go this far without talking about the story. It’s paced very well, as I said, and I think that’s what I really liked most about it. The game never feels repetitive or stale because there’s always something interesting and different going on. The planets you visit for the main missions all have different themes to each situation – one is a survival-horror, another is a large, futuristic city, and then are other planets you’ll visit that feel completely desolate and lifeless, until you stumble across enemy outposts. Overall, the game just always feels unique – I never felt like anything was too familiar to something I had already seen, and this kept me compelled to keep playing, because I would never really know what to expect upon landing on a new planet.
The story itself is very good – it’s interesting, climactic at all the right moments, and full of memorable characters and situations. I felt like there could have been more substantial choices to make during the course of the game, but again, I missed out on a lot of the side missions. The ending was incredibly intense and I like how the story involves Saren, your primary villain in the game. Once you find out his true motives for what he’s planning for the galaxy, the story instantly becomes that much better. I’m pretty tired of seeing villains in games plotting the destruction of the world “just because,” and the way the game gradually unfolds the bigger picture to you is just awesome. I can’t stress enough how much I love the pacing in this game, it just works out so well.
So, that’s my thoughts on Mass Effect. A great RPG for sure, and one of my all-time faves thanks to the great story, excellent pacing, and (mostly) enjoyable combat. From what I know, the combat takes a huge leap in the sequel, so it’ll be cool to experience it coming literally straight from Mass Effect 1.
Mass 2, here I come!
-rav4ge
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