Mass Effect is a rpg/third person shooter from Bioware. No doubt you've heard of them. Assuming you have, you should already have some idea about the game. Bioware is known for their RPGs which generally offer the player the choice of going down the path of good or evil. Mass Effect changes that up a bit by giving your character one goal with several ways of going about completing it. You have the Paragon path and the Renegade path. Both paths lead to a similar end- saving the galaxy- but one stops to help people along the way, while the other bowls over anyone who gets between you and the big bad. In my opinion this is a change for the better. In games that give you the choice to be good or evil it can be difficult to present a story that works coming at it from both angles. Another change in the usual set-up is that Paragon and Renegade don't nullify each other. Generally an situation will offer Paragon points or Renegade points depending on how you tackle it, but otherwise they don't interact. Instead each one allows you to increase your charm or intimidate skills respectively. This actually makes a lot of sense. You are effectively a rising star in the galaxy as the first human Spectre and as you gain a reputation for kindness or violence people become more willing to listen to you if you use those approaches. Of course half the time I picked the intimidate option when it appeared but still ended up getting 75% of the Paragon points and probably only half of the Renegade points. I'm just not good at being mean.
Still following the tradition of a Bioware game Mass Effect drops you off in the middle of a galaxy full of planets to explore. There are roughly a dozen different star clusters each with two or three solar systems and each solar system has a planet that you can land on or a ship to investigate. The majority of the other planets can also be surveyed to find resources or artifacts. Of course, the downside to this is the fact that most of the planetary exploration is fairly generic. Every planet but the story specific ones consists of mountainous terrain which you attempt to navigate around in your Mako looking for points of interest. Generally you come across a crashed probe or such that will grant you items or artifacts, a couple of resource deposits, and maybe a sidequest base. The latter comes in three varieties: underground ruin, military complex, and warehouse. So you'll be shooting up essentially the same three buildings over and over. Same goes for spaceships, except there's only one variety of them. I've decided that they mass produce the buildings which is why they all look the same. Of course why a civilian ship and a military freighter looks the same is anyone's guess. That aside, the very unbalanced number of necessary and unnecessary planets makes for rather uneven pacing. There are four required planets plus the end game one and I'd wager a score of unnecessary planets. If you ignored all of those you could probably beat the game in 20 hours. Might not be easy, what with all the missed experience, but could probably be done (then again, after a certain level your skill growth drops by half so if you can at least reach that point it might not be a huge issue).
As I mentioned at the start, the action is handled in a 3rd person shooter style. However, you shouldn't jump into this expecting anything on par with Gears of War. The cover system is fickle and often not all that great. Most of the time I only used cover while in the Mako and that doesn't actually have a cover system. Most enemies will go down quickly between the barrage of gunfire you and your allies unleash and the blasts of various tech and biotic powers. The only problems will generally come from instant kills (snipers and rockets) and melee enemies as you don't have much to keep them at bay and they generally hurt. Of course, game lacks a checkpoint system so be sure to save often. Nothing sucks more than landing on a planet, doing half the stuff on it and then getting one-shot killed and having to start over from touchdown. The Mako points are similarly frustrating, just if you took all the aiming and movement problems and doubled them. As mentioned above, EVERY map is full of mountains that you will have to climb at some point if you want to grab everything and while the Mako is the ultimate ATV, even it can't handle the mountains the game throws at you. It gets even worse when you're expected to fight. Movement and aiming are handled completely separately. Going forward, backwards and turning is dependent on which way the Mako is facing and ignores where you're aiming. This is a horrible idea. Especially when you decide to zoom in so you can't see which way you're facing and have to start dodging missiles. Then again, on normal the Mako is nigh indestructible unless you come across a Thresher Maw. In which case all you can do is keep moving an pray it doesn't pop up under you.
And now it's story time. The basic premise is that it's a hundred or two hundred years in the future and we've mastered interstellar travel after finding the ruins of a highly advanced civilization on Mars. We are now part of a galactic civilization ruled over by a council of the three most prominent races and trying to get a human to become a fourth member. The game opens with you going to Eden Prime to discover it being attacked by a race of machines being led by a rogue Spectre named Saren. Spectres being about what you'd get if you crossed a jedi with Boba Fett. They're tasked with keeping the galaxy safe, but have access to all kinds of special equipment and don't have to follow the laws as long as they get the job done. Anyway, after convincing the Council of this threat you become the first human Spectre and are sent out after Saren. The story's pretty solid and, when you're actually progressing it, it moves fairly quickly. Of course you do have the horrible pacing I mentioned earlier if you visit the "extra" planets.
Characters, for the most part, fairly interesting. You've got girl from a nomadic race of aliens on a traditional quest to prove herself, a merc from a race of warriors infected with a genetic disease to drastically slow their reproduction, an alien cop from the government center called the Citadel who is tired of playing by the rules and joins up with you to actually stop criminals, the daughter of one of your enemies (not a spoiler since you're told that about her right after becoming a Spectre), and then a pair of humans. The humans are honestly the weakest part of your crew. Kaiden is a TERRIBLE character because they took all of his character development and threw it out the window. Sure you can talk to him and hear about it, but it's all in a nearly deadpan voice that made me want to kick him off the ship. I honestly expected him to die within the first hour of playing the game. Didn't help that he was the same class as me so I had no reason to use him. Ashely isn't as bad, as she at least is obviously a character and actually has a few issues that come up. However, I just couldn't stand her due to her tenancy to try and suck-up to you. The aliens were just a lot more interesting, so I ended up leaving my humans on the ship. Kind of seemed like it undermined one of the game's themes. Though I did have a minor problem with the alien designs: they all have three fingers. The only exception is the race that's basically blue-skinned women, so they've got five. Would it have killed Bioware to throw a fourth finger in there somewhere for variety?
All-in-all it's you're standard Bioware game. It fixes a few things, breaks a few others, and throws some new elements into the mix, but it's got most of what you'd expect from Bioware by this point. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go play Mass Effect 2.
Final Scoring: 8/10
(yeah, screw my reasoning)
"We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything."
Thomas A. Edison
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