Mass Effect

To begin with let me tell you the following: I played both the Xbox and PC versions and I can tell you, must tell you to get a 360 controller for your PC to play it. Mass Effect has been designed to be controlled with a game pad.

The game looks fantastic; I got it running at 1280x768 px in full-screen mode —all settings in medium and no dynamic shadows— on a AMD Phenom II X4 920 at 2.80 GHz with 4 GB of RAM and a Nvidia GeForce 210 card with 1Gb of DDR2 RAM. I only experienced some hiccups when the engine threw at me lots of fogging and heavy water effects. If your computer is even worse than mine, you can drop the resolution to 1024x768 on the windowed mode and it'll do pretty good. For a 3 year-old game it still looks amazing: water surfaces, reflections, textures and the lightening are terrific.

The gameplay is reminiscent of Gears of War with RPG elements thrown in as our squad members can access their abilities either passively by means of a battle menu or actively using the keyboard short-cuts. We control commander Shepard that can either be female or male and whose face we can design to our own liking; Shepard is the only character we can fully control as the rest of them, members of our squad, are semi-automatic. Our active squad is composed by three party members and they can be ordered to move forward, backward, attack or defend and we can also access their skills through the passive battle menu. These skills come in the form of biotic powers, mainly telekinetic abilities such as pull, push, force shield and space distortion: biotics are Mass Effect's gameplay core and a lot of fun. Apart from shooting and using biotic skills in a back third person perspective there are several missions that require vehicle driving and shooting: the Mako. These missions usually are pretty straight-forward however fun; the Mako is equipped with a rail gun and a cannon and both will heat and shut down temporarily after repeated and heavy use: the Mako will also take damage that can be repaired using omnigel paks. The Mako will also serve to explore the different planets that will be visited, on which resources and secrets can be found to progress the story, unlock features and improve the equipment. There are more RPG elements than using biotic powers, weapons and armours can be purchased and upgraded and the game is heavily scripted as well with multiple conversation choices to pick leading to different results.

Even though I suggested getting a console controller to play it, using the keyboard-mouse combination has its advantages because we can assign more than two buttons to the special abilities. The mouse is used to target and move the camera around as well as the Mako turret, the left button is for shooting and the right button is for precise targeting. The space bar is for bringing up the passive battle menu and the shift key for running like in Gears of War. Fortunately, the control setup allows mouse inversion and tweaking for all the key assignments.

The sound quality of the game is really good but not impressive overall however its voice acting is terrific and this is where this aspect of the game shines.

The musical score is futuristic and serves its purpose wonderfully yet it is not memorable with the exception of the end-titles song.

The story is really engaging and well written with several plot twists. Each team member has their own and we get to know them by means of the several conversations available through the course of the game. The best part of the scripting is how much detail Bioware put into the universe to make it plausible: they went to the extent of adding an encyclopaedia with all the game scientific and biological terminology as well as planetary information and entries on the alien races' civilizations. There is so much thought put into this universe unlike most of the other sci-fi games released except the Xenosaga series, which is even more complex. The whole universe sustains itself in a wonderful and believable way thanks to the writer's wit that allowed them to come up with technology and scientific concepts not far away from our current reality and what we might consider possible.

The art is not impressive in a complicated way: its functional, it suits the universe and serves to sustain the fictional world of the script yet it is not original. Some planets are beautiful and breath-taking and the Normandy has been wonderfully designed. There is a lot of simplicity put into the art design that fortunately highlights the overall impression rather than making it dull nonetheless most planetary surfaces and facilities are repetitive with the same type and distribution of elements within them.

All in all, Mass Effect is one of the best games ever released: it has wonderful graphics, a fantastic voice acting, entertaining gameplay and a very well written and cohesive fictional world; there isn't much else that anybody can ask for a good game to be good and Mass Effect covers all of these aspects superbly.

Graphics: 10

Control: 8

Gameplay: 10

Sound: 9

Music: 7

Story: 9.5

Art: 8,5

///------TOTAL: 9 (4.5/5 stars) [rounded]------///