Mass Effect - Impression

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Although playing it for different durations of time nearly every day since Christmas I have yet to complete Mass Effect. Why is that, you might ask? Even though I’m now 22 hours into the game I’ve barely progressed in the main story because I keep going around completing side missions and exploring uncharted planets. When expressing such to my brother, who had given it to me for Christmas and inquired if I had beaten it yet, he summed it up perfectly: "Well, that’s BioWare for you."

This game is so impressive it’s kept me from even touching Mario Galaxy yet, and if you know what a complete Nintendo kid I am that should tell you something. I don’t even like Sci-Fi that much and I find Mass Effect entirely engrossing. Of course, the RPG aspect has something to do with that. If you ever played BioWare’s precursor to this game, Knights of the Old Republic, you are going to love Mass Effect.

For this game I’m taking on the role of Isabella Shepard, a character of my own creation and what is bound to be the first of many characters in the first of many playthroughs. Being able to create your own "Shepard" and deciding his or her actions really gets you into the game, and really makes you feel closer to Shepard. The game itself is unbelievably cinematic, the characters are incredibly detailed and realistic, and the story is dramatically engaging.

But with so much to talk about I want to start with just the general conversation-based gameplay: the tiers of interaction are so in-depth that they alone are impressive enough to warrant a purchase. I can’t imagine how they managed to not only plan and program a variety of different conversations with hundreds of characters with several alternatives to how those conversations can progress, but to take all that and make every bit of interaction spoken. That’s right, no matter who you’re talking to, or what conversation path you decide to take every single thing you or anyone else can say is spoken dialog. Just consider the thousands if not millions of voice clips that were required for that, especially when factoring in that wandering NPCs talk to themselves, or each other, or can make comments to you in context to the situation or area, or that any of your six choices of unique characters to have as your two squad members on any given mission can make comments on the area or situation and sometimes carry on conversations among themselves on elevators. And lets not forget you can choose to be male or female in this game, so they had to do a good chunk of this dialog twice when it was required to be gender-specific.

No matter how you choose to respond to a character 99% of the time the conversation sounds completely natural. And the acting is good. Really good.

You can gain "Paragon" or "Renegade" points depending how you act in most situations and this also determines how many of those situations end, what sort of reputation you build up and how other characters react to you throughout the game. On my first character I was sort of balanced between the two for a little while (a bit more Renegade now), but I also have an out of control, uncouth, reporter-punching full Renegade on a second file, and I plan to go through yet another file as a straight-laced, straight-up soldier type (which will be a challenge for me!)

The character creation is pretty awesome, you get to control most aspects of the character’s appearance (though working off a basic face shape) from skin color, to their nose and lips, right down to any facial scarring. You can make some pretty different looking characters this way, and you get to even choose the character’s first name. Either way, though, the character is always Commander Shepard, you just get to decide who that is. You can, also, just go through the game as the generic John Shepard if you wish, the guy pictured on the box, but you still get to decide if he’s a good guy or an anti-hero.

Abigail Shepard (the crazy one.)

You also get three different choices for your character’s history and psychological profile, which also determines how people talk about you and each seems to have some unique side missions. History-wise you can either be an army brat, a colonist who saw your family and friends killed in a raid, or an Earthborn orphan who was raised on the streets and escaped a life of crime for the military. Personality wise you can either be a Sole Survivor, your squad was captured in a mission gone wrong and only you survived the torture and mental anguish, a War Hero, you saved your entire squad during one mission, or Ruthless, you sent half your squad to their death just to get the job done. Isabella is Earthborn-Ruthless, making her quite intimidating. My next character, the aforementioned reporter-punching crazy, Abigail Shepard, is a Colonist-Sole Survivor so already people thought she was batshit insane, now I’m just proving their point. Don’t worry, I will play a guy eventually, he’s going to be my straight-laced one. You also get to choose from a variety of warrior classes, from a straight-up soldier to a Biotics (kind of a telekinetic thing) expert to anything in between.

The plot is also fantastic, so much so I don’t want to give any of it away. I’ll just say that I find I’m following it fairly easily although my mind isn’t able to process alot of Sci-Fi very well most of the time (as soon as people start talking about imaginary technology and turbo thrusters and shit I just sort of zone out.) Although sometimes the supporting characters can feel a bit generic. Like Joker, the typically wise-cracking pilot (voiced by Seth Green!) Or Captain Anderson, the blandly regal and authoritative military man. Or even Liara, who is, unfortunately, the only female you can romance as the female character and is one of those brilliant but naive otherworldly maidens who speaks in an annoyingly formal fashion without much inflection. Those types of characters tend to drive me crazy, but according to this game goddamn do I love blue women. *sigh*.

Although you spend alot of your time standing around talking or wandering the halls of high-tech places don’t think there isn’t any action in Mass Effect. The action is generally third-person shooting, and on Normal its fairly easy. At least I think so, I base that on the fact I generally have terrible aim when shooting in video games, no matter what game it is (except for that time I somehow mysteriously amassed a high percentage of head shots in GTA: Vice City.) Apparently on Veteran mode the enemies level up faster than you do, which I can only imagine is brutal. To help you along the way, you can find or buy new weapons and armor, as well as weapon upgrades. Upgrades do everything from alter the nature of the weapon, like reducing its recoil, reducing how many shots until it overheats etc. You can also get ammo upgrades, my favorites so far being Radioactive or Polonium rounds, which are kinda nasty in that they literally melt your enemies into nothing but a sorch mark on the floor. You can also get armor upgrades which give you extra shields, hard plating, or again my favorite a medical interface that lets you gradually recover hp.

The environments you make your way through are absolutely stunning as well, although on the side missions some of them are just some of the same buildings and planets you’ve been to already only re-skinned with a completely different texture, but it works well for just side things. Every story-based area is completely unique and the level of detail, design and artistry is amazing. Even so, its kind of hard to appreciate, even for someone like me who tends to pick out lighting effects, cinematography and other such techniques while watching films. I have trouble ever saying "Wow that’s a lovely texture" or "Wow that’s a great design" in Mass Effect because I don’t feel like I’m even looking at a design. The areas engulf you so much and feel so real it just draws you in too much to admire how much work went into it, you’re more likely to be thinking about exploring the building or preparing for any enemies ahead. Stylistically the game’s color scheme is mainly blue and orange, which comes off very nicely.

All this sounds pretty awesome, right? Well it is. But It would be wrong of me not to warn you of some of the game’s slightly annoying little problems. It may seem like I’m nitpicking here, but its worth to mention that the game has some problems loading textures and its glaringly noticeable. Many times, when going to the squad menu, changing angles during cutscenes, switching areas in levels the characters load before the textures do. So for up to 10 seconds or so a character’s face or outfit can be blurry before the texture finally loads, the scene or action having gone on without it. Even this far into the game I find it rather distracting.

It can also be slightly glitchy in places, your character doesn’t always transition well from standing idle to going into whatever pre-set animation there was for a given bit of dialog. The characters can also glitch a bit when the game autosaves or when transitioning between scenes or angles in the cutscenes.

But other than these two problems the game is perfect. Absolute-fucking-lutely perfect. If you have a 360 you need to pick it up, even if you don’t like shooters, even if you don’t like Sci-Fi. I don’t tend to like either and I can’t put this game down. If all the websites and magazines are any indication, Mass Effect is likely to win Game of the Year across the board.