Introduction
BioWare released Mass Effect for the Xbox 360 in November of last year. It was their first full release in over two years, and it reviewed pretty well. The worst score I saw for it was 80%, and some jokers out there even gave it 100%. Somewhere near the end of the game’s development cycle, BioWare started working with Demiurge Studios on the project, and Demiurge took over the reins when it was time to convert Mass Effect to the PC.
I didn’t play the Xbox 360 version of Mass Effect. I haven’t touched a console since the ColecoVision back in the 80’s. So if you’re hoping to hear how the PC version of Mass Effect differs from the Xbox 360 version, you’ll have to look elsewhere. What I hope to do in this review is let people know whether Mass Effect is a good game or not, and whether it works well on the PC. If you have ADD, or if you don’t want to read hundreds of words of text, the simple answer is (yes.)
Premise
Mass Effect takes place a couple hundred years in the future. In 2148, humans discovered some artifacts on Mars, which leapfrogged their technology enough to allow them to explore the stars. They found, of course, that they weren’t alone in the universe, and while they met a variety of space-faring races including turians, asarians, and others, they never found the race that left the artifacts behind on Mars. That race, the Protheans, had disappeared.
As Mass Effect opens up, you find yourself in a military cruiser named the Normandy, but your first mission (covered in the tutorial) goes badly. You’re (touched) by an ancient Prothean beacon, which gives you some insight into what happened to that race, and you learn that an agent of the Council, the ruling body of the galaxy, has gone rogue and plans to do something evil with an object called (the conduit.) The Council decides that you should be the one to track down the agent and discover his agenda, and, as your investigation progresses, you visit dozens of alien worlds and battle pirates and giant insects and more — before finally confronting the agent and putting the matter to rest.
Character Development
Mass Effect uses sort of a generic character development system. There are three main classes — soldiers (who have access to all weapons and armor), engineers (who use technological skills to do things like overload enemy shields), and adepts (who use their brains to do things like throw enemies to the ground) — plus three hybrid classes, giving six classes in all. Each class gets about a dozen (talents,) including weapon proficiencies and class-specific skills, which are rated from 0 to 12. Characters get points for these talents each time they level up, with the main character getting more points than his or her companions. There aren’t any attributes or feats or perks; talents alone define a character’s capabilities.
Besides talents, characters are also rated as being (paragon) or (renegade.) These paths are independent of each other (for example, gaining paragon points doesn’t subtract renegade points, and you can sometimes gain both at the same time), and while they’re not exactly the same as (good) and (evil,) they’re close enough. The paragon path is linked to the (charm) talent, and the renegade path is linked to the (intimidate) talent, but otherwise they don’t have much of an influence on the game, other than to give you two ways to solve most quests.
Unfortunately, after selecting a class and a path, there isn’t much else for you to decide for your character. That’s because the game gives you so many talent points that by the end of the campaign you can max out any talent that you’re even remotely interested in, plus probably some others as well. Mass Effect isn’t a game where you’re going to see a lot of discussions about favorite builds, simply because every character can learn just about everything. The game would have been more interesting with a level cap of, say, 30 instead of 50 (or 60).
Controls
Mass Effect has a similar look and feel as Knights of the Old Republic (right down to the same sort of blue interface). You control a single character using a third-person perspective, and you use the WASD keys to move and the mouse to steer. The left mouse button fires your weapon, the right mouse button zooms your view, and hotkeys trigger your skills. You can also press the spacebar to pause the game and bring up a combat HUD, which allows you to give simple orders to your companions. You can also use the HUD to trigger your skills or change your weapons, just in case you don’t like using hotkeys.
In other words, the interface is about what you’d expect from a PC game with a third-person perspective — but that’s a good thing. Usually when a game is designed with consoles and PCs in mind, the interface ends up consisting of a bunch of clunky menus (such as in Fable) or the developers forget how useful the keyboard is (such as in Oblivion). But Mass Effect feels like it was designed for the PC, and everything is convenient and easy to control.
Gameplay
Mass Effect is fairly well balanced between dialogue and combat. You start out in the Citadel, a great flying city in the heart of the galaxy, and most of the quests there involve talking to people and learning about your environment. This part of the campaign feels the most like a BioWare game, and the Citadel fits right in with the worlds from the Knights of the Old Republic games.
Once you leave the Citadel and start exploring the galaxy, however, the game enters its Elder Scrolls phase and gets much more combat-oriented and much more disappointing. The worlds involved in the main plotline are detailed and interesting, and they work pretty well, but the 30+ optional worlds are a disaster. Each solar system has a single planet you can land on (or a ship you can board), and each planet has roughly the same make-up: two mineral sites to survey, a crashed probe to examine, a mummified explorer to loot, and some enemies to kill. That is, all of the optional solar systems are about the same, right down to the extensive re-use of building layouts. Having lots of places to go is a good thing — but only if they’re fresh and distinctive, and Mass Effect doesn’t even come close to achieving that. (This issue might be somewhat addressed by the (Bring Down the Sky) download, which will introduce a new species to deal with, but this download isn’t yet ready for the PC.)
The optional part of the campaign takes up about half of Mass Effect‘s 30-hour playing time, and while it gets a little repetitive, the main part of the campaign makes up for it. For starters, the writing in the campaign is excellent. The overall storyline didn’t really grab me (perhaps because it is so similar to Frederik Pohl’s Heechee books), but the dialogue is about as good as it gets. BioWare is always good about fleshing out its characters and worlds, and making everything believable, and Mass Effect is no exception. The six people who join you during your travels are all distinct, and they all add something to the main storyline, but unfortunately BioWare went back to its Neverwinter Nights style of companions (who simply follow you around and only have something new to say after major events), and so there isn’t as much dialogue as you might expect.
Combat is also fun. Despite the game taking place hundreds of years in the future, people still only use regular guns (pistols, shotguns, automatic rifles, and sniper rifles) for combat, and so all battles take place at range. In a nice touch, characters can use cover (such as doorways and crates) to hide from enemies, and only expose themselves when they fire their weapons. The interface even handles this effectively. For example, if you hide at the edge of a doorway, then the camera changes its focus to the doorway rather than your character, giving you a good view of your enemies. On the downside, since combat only involves guns firing bullets, it’s not especially fun to watch the battles, and sometimes it’s difficult to tell what’s going on. Also, the game uses level scaling to match enemies to your character, but the algorithm for this doesn’t work very well, and the game gets easier the further you get into it.
Finally, as has become the trend in their games lately, BioWare included some puzzles and mini-games in Mass Effect. The main mini-game is a decryption game, which you usually need to play to unlock safes and crates. This mini-game was changed for the PC version of Mass Effect. From what I can tell, the Xbox 360 version had some sort of timed pattern-matching game, but in the PC version you just need to guide your cursor through a series of rotating tumblers to reach the center of the lock. It’s a quick and easy game to play, and I liked it, but then I almost always like mini-games. Sadly though, Mass Effect only has a couple of puzzles, and one of them is yet another Towers of Hanoi rip-off. I don’t know what it is with BioWare and Towers of Hanoi (they also used it in Knights of the Old Republic), but they definitely need to hire somebody to think up some new puzzles for them.
Conclusion
Overall, I enjoyed Mass Effect. It’s not going to break into my list of all-time favorite role-playing games (where some of BioWare’s other titles reside), but it’s a solid effort. I played it twice — once with a paragon soldier on the default difficulty setting, and once with a renegade engineer on the hardcore setting — and while I was a little bit disappointed that the campaign didn’t change very much the second time through, it was still fun to try out different dialogue options and different companions. So if you’re looking for a classic-style role-playing game that’ll give you 30 hours or more of solid entertainment, then it’s easy to recommend Mass Effect to you.
