Mass Effect

Mass Effect is the newest "pick-a-path" game from the people who almost built that style of game mechanic, BioWare, and while the exterior of the Mass Effect house may look pretty, it isn't really standing on the sturdiest of foundations.

The game has you playing as "Fill-In-The-Blank" Shepard. A customizable character that can be male or female with a couple of different options that affect his/her back story. Customizing characters is pretty easy due to the fact that you can really only change facial appearances, hair, and gender. It's not a super detailed set of options, but you can come up with some pretty creative looking faces. I modeled my first character after Jack Bauer from 24 and my second character after Kate from Lost. Both ended up looking vaguely similar, but they wouldn't win a look-a-like contest. Still it's always nice to have the illusion that you're playing the game as a one-of-a-kind character.

Shepard is a member of the crew of the Normandy, a ship in the Earth's far off future version of a military. Humanity is trying to earn the respect of the other alien races within their galaxy by forming a working bond with "The Council". The Council is the outer space equivalent of the United Nations and they have their own private army of protectors/agents called the "Specters". When Shepard is sent to a planet to investigate a distress signal, he discovers that one of these Specters named Saren has gone rogue and is looking to unlock an ancient threat to the galaxy. After Shepard is "probed" by an ancient artifact, the wheels are set in motion for what's to come for Shepard and his (eventual) crew of rag tag misfits.

If there's positives to be given to Mass Effect they have to go to the writing and the team that set up the conversation engine. The story and how it plays out really are a high water mark for this type of BioWare-ish style of game. The big plus in this game's favor has be given to the inclusion of full audio dialogue and a facial expressiveness to the characters as they speak. It really sucks you in to the story when you get to see some real inflection in the speech and also on the faces of the characters within the game. It's also to the games benefit that the story really holds up no matter the vocal path you choose to take, Paragon (good) or Renegade (bad). Both are viable, and lead to the same inevitable conclusion, but the path you choose to get there really does vary in some very substantial ways. Paragon seemed to be the easiest path for me to follow during my first play thru, but the second time thru, as a Renegade, let's just say that Shepard (and the player) have to make some supremely evil and short sighted decisions that completely change the tone of the game and the ultimate ending. More so than previous BioWare games of this nature, or perhaps the inclusion of full speech just helps make the player's decisions resonate more.

The game, from an audio/visual standpoint, when firing on all cylinders, is also top shelf, but actually getting there is another story entirely. I've never been the sort of player who would ever deny that the Xbox 360 isn't a loud console, but while playing Mass Effect you can magnify the experience by a factor of ten. The sounds coming from my machine actually made me feel sorry for the 360, and unfortunately it shows up in the game too. The framerate, at times, is embarrassingly bad, and when the game isn't trying to disguise load times behind incredibly slow elevator rides, it suffers from random screen freezes as the game tries to catch up while loading new areas. The loading times also cause some really hideous looking texture pop in as, again, the system struggles to keep up. There were also more than a half dozen times where I became hung up on objects to the point where I had to reload a previous save. I don't know if this is because the game needed more development time or that Mass Effect is pushing the 360 too hard, but the technical glitches ended up being too much of a barrier for me, personally, to let slide just because I liked the story.

I will say that when the game is playable it is pretty passable, and gets really fun during later levels when your characters are at max levels, but even then there are interface, pacing, and overall aesthetic choices that bring the game down. The inventory menu is very plain jane with little to no way to quickly sort loot drops. Sorting really wouldn't be that much of problem if it weren't for the fact that this game throws tons upon tons of loot at you, and then puts a 150 cap on the amount items you can keep. The auto save function is, for all intents and purposes, broken as it generally will only auto save before and after each mission, which can be a real killer if you get sloppy. As for the aesthetic choices, and it does not pertain to the world or the alien designs, but more towards planet surface designs and interiors of side missions. All the planets are mountainous in terrain, barely inhabited, and the interiors of buildings and caves have, what seem like, around three or four floor plan variations. They do some color swapping on the some of the planet surfaces, and throw in some nice weather effects, with a cool outer space dune buggy to drive around on said planets, but after a hand full of side missions are completed (with very similar objectives) the repetitiveness starts to sink in.

I hate to come across as some kind of hater of Mass Effect, I did really enjoy the story, and I will definitely give a sequel a chance to fix some of the bits I didn't like about it. The writing, dialogue, character design, voice acting, and overall world that Bioware has created is absolutely top of the line. The story of Shepard and the crew of the Normandy is super compelling, I just felt the actual game could have been that much better with some technical fixes and maybe even in dropping the side mission stuff entirely. A nice tight 10 to 15 hours sci-fi RPG, with a more user friendly interface, and a more stable framerate, could have launched this far closer towards the "perfect" zone for me. If you can look past its fumbling and stumbling technical issues though, there's a great sci-fi story to be had in Mass Effect for Xbox 360.

+Great, engrossing, storyline
+Great character design
+Great dialogue choices
+Great voice work

-Framerate issues
-Loading and save issues
-Texture pop in issues
-Poor user interface