MASS EFFECT
Reviewed on Xbox 360. Also on PC. Dev: Bioware. Publisher: Microsoft
Well, fucken done and dusted. And now that it’s an EA game, even though EA had nothing to do with development or publishing or distribution, they make all the money and of course, soon enough this game will forever be known as Mass Effect 1. Or, the game that the sequels aren’t as good as…
So Mass Effect is a big RPG, more in the vein of Jade Empire than KotOR, even if the universe is just the same as Bioware’s old SW game just with the force renamed Mass Effect, and guns instead of Lightsabres.
You play as Commander Shepard who, depending on how you customise at the start of the game, is either a man or a woman who early in the games joins the Jed… er Spectres, but depending on your early choice at the time you customise can either be a soldier, or a biotic (jedi forces) or a technician. So play as a soldier to start with. You basically chase the big bad across the galaxy, and along the way you take on side quests. The side quests are all exactly the same: you visit all of the points of interest and recover artefacts (pressing buttons in sequence in response to the prompts), then visit a base that looks the same on which ever planet you visit and clear out a few bad guys. Or you can board a ship that always looks the same and has the same layout and defeat a few enemies there as well.
On the main hub level, the Citadel, the quests there are more of the talk to this guy and talk to that dude type stuff. My favourite part was one that a lot of other people disliked, the Mako. I enjoyed driving around the planets because I could drive up cliffs and over mountains instead of corridors and valleys.
So the game has pretty graphics, mostly a decent framerate and nice sound and VO, even the cutscenes are a bit more involved than the conversations in KotOR. It took about 25-26 hours on medium to do most of the side quests (maybe 70-80%). I liked it and now I don’t want to see another game for at least 24 hours.
PS-I didn’t get no full digital nudity!
C1: Rating 2/3. (The score would have been 3/3 if not for the highly repetitive side missions)
