Without a doubt, BioWare is an incredibly consistent developer in the game production field. Nearly everything they produce comes out golden. When the weakest game produced is Jade Empire (a quality Netjak 8.0), you know that this developer is something special. So, when BioWare announced Mass Effect, their next generation RPG effort, the expectations were set high.
Mass Effect follows the adventures of John Sheppard as he travels to various worlds through the Stargate and battles the threat of the Wraith…wait, wrong John Sheppard. This John Sheppard (Jane if you’re female or whatever you want it to be if you make your own character), Commander Sheppard, is a member of the Alliance Military, an intergalactic governing body that speaks for the whole of the human species (nations still exist, and through game story elements, many of the ones that exist today like the United States, Mexico and Russia) who eventually becomes a special forces operative with a full-on license to cut apart anything he wants on his way to save the galaxy from a whacko.
The reasoning for the game is fairly decent, but the entire pacing and story quality are a bit flat. While I loved the extensive text and dialogue as BioWare made an attempt to do something most other console RPGs fail at, flesh out the characters and the world, the actual results aren’t terribly exciting. The more interesting story elements come from the optional side quests, not the main line itself. Furthermore, Mass Effect is heavily predictable and I am willing to wager the broad storyline of the entire trilogy and be fairly confident I’d be right. For the record, I was attempting to write a sci-fi novel around where I think Mass Effect is going and about 175 pages in I realized it was incredibly stupid. I’d not bother getting three-quarters the way through a publishable novel and scrap it unless it was utter garbage.
Still, I commend BioWare for at least giving it a good try. In the world of SquareEnix and their ilk’s games that are more cliché and predictable that have characters that fall in love in 5 minutes and developers that expect us to care about characters with minimal exposition, BioWare is fairly high up in the storytelling department. That doesn’t necessarily mean it is any good. With the budgets and development times these high profile games are getting nowadays, I expect them to start seriously ramping up the storytelling department. Canned stories are just not cutting it anymore. BioWare had plenty to work with. There was an incredibly well designed universe with mountains of descriptions about every planet and alien species, interesting alien species, fun technologies and a decent premise; it was just completely bungled when being glued together.
Another major roadblock to the storytelling, apart from it not being terribly creative, is the inconsistent voice acting. While the voice actors themselves were incredibly high quality, from the male or female version of Sheppard all the way down to random side characters are voiced on par with any professional film. However, the issues come from horrible volume issues. Kaiden is the most consistent offender. Whenever he speaks, you have to focus in on what he is saying because the ambient sounds drown him out. If you raise the volume, Sheppard’s speech or other sounds become painfully loud. Other instances of inconsistent volume come from side-mission dialogue and the conversations in elevators (which do a good job giving the characters life and motivations) are difficult to hear. The worst instance is the second-to-last elevator ride in the game where your squad members are discussing something and I have yet to figure out what it is. I just can’t hear them.
The dialogue itself is also inconsistent. While I like long dialogue and the more cinematic approach to speech utilizing a phrase to direct entire speeches is great, the problem comes from the fact that there aren’t that many different options. I played the game through twice, once to cover the Paragon and Renegade path (more on this later) and found that in many instances, it didn’t matter what option you picked, Sheppard says the exact same thing. I felt that many choices were added just to artificially break up the conversation when it was starting to get lengthy. Many choice breaks could have been better served by just not interrupting the conversation with the choice wheel down at the bottom.
As for the Renegade and Paragon options, they have little to no bearing on the actual course of the game. The main purpose is for different outcomes in fairly narrow situations. The overall storyline is completely altered by an 11th hour whim. I could roll around being the a-hole of the universe yet still repent at the last second. I can also want to save every fuzzy creature in the universe and hug people’s sadness away then stab them in the back for no apparent reason. When I figured this out I was kicking myself for completing a second play through. All I had to do was save it right before that critical decision point, load up, and see the alternate ending without spending another 12 hours getting there.
The story wouldn’t have been problematic had the gameplay been well designed. However, like every other part of Mass Effect, the gameplay is also inconsistent. The ground game is very well done. Mass Effect is a hybrid shooter/RPG, with a strong emphasis on the RPG side. The success of your attacks is defined around stats, both character related and weapon related, and ammo is not a concern. However, like a shooter, you can’t just stand out in the open, blazing your gun around and expect to do well. You do have to worry about cover, your allies to draw off the attack and shield levels that deplete rapidly. Basically, you can’t just stand out in the open like in Knights of the Old Republic because you’ll get slaughtered. Unfortunately, the excellence of the third person shooting scenes is completely sullied by the horror that is called the Mako. The Mako is an armored personnel carrier that functions as a drop ship when going down to various planets. The vehicle controls erratically, has horrible speed control and bounces around like there isn’t any gravity. You can hit a small object and go flying off course which is particularly bad in the main storyline missions. In the main story, you frequently jump into the Mako and drive around narrow paths with this unwieldy vehicle and run into frequent danger of falling off the side into a pool of lava or to your death thousands of feet below. Other issues come from you getting stuck because the Mako frequently defies the laws of gravity; even the jump jets are completely useless. What’s worse, half the main storyline missions and nearly all the side quests rely heavily on using the Mako, which is insult to injury as far as I’m concerned.
Another major flaw in the gameplay is money and Omni-Gel management. Omni-Gel is a universal object used to hack into computers, unlock doors and repair the Mako. About mid-way through the game, all of these objects become useless as the game liberally throws you equipment that is clearly inferior to your current arsenal which means you just sell them or break them up into Omni-Gel. The gel is used as a shortcut option around playing the boring button match sequence to hack things, which I heavily relied on later in the game because I got tired of playing a rhythm game without the music. Money is even worse as it has almost no use beyond buying the best weapons and armor in the game, which you can easily outfit your entire crew, backup squad members included, without much effort. At the end of the first play through, I had the best equipment in the game and I ran into the money cap of 9,999,999 credits and 999 Omni-Gel cap. Mass Effect might as well have just left money out entirely and handed us the equipment, it amounts to the same thing.
To continue Mass Effect’s tradition of inconsistencies, we are now coming up on the graphics. The graphics are particularly nice to look at, gorgeous even … after they decide to finish loading. The pop-in in Mass Effect makes Halo 2 look reasonable; in nearly every conversation, I am treated with what could be a tutorial in how to apply advanced texture techniques to models. The characters start off with the basic model, colored. After about a second, the first texture level is applied, this is the basic texture itself. After a half second, a second texture level is applied, putting on depth effects like bump mapping. Finally, advanced effects like reflections are applied. This was cool the first couple of times I saw it as it gave me an in-depth understanding of how models were given life, but it became irritating about 5 minutes into the game when every single time I entered a conversation it happened! This is the single largest killer of the suspension of disbelief factor, which is a critical element into getting into a game. This ruined the game experience more than the weak story, inconsistent volume and the Mako ever could. It also is likely the primary reason why the Xbox 360 was constantly making noise, frequently dragging me out of the world because of the whirr.
Other little things irritated me as well. One, which is sillier than a true irritant, is that Commander Sheppard has to be one of the densest, if not the densest, character in a game that is not designed as a comedy. Early on, when talking to a character named Barla Vonn, he tells Sheppard that he is being watched closely by the Citadel. What does Sheppard do? He actually turns around and looks behind him, as if he expected to see some alien in a trench coat, fedora and sunglasses to be hiding behind his portable bush, taking notes on a pad as Sheppard walked around the place. A second irritant is the management of the navigation map. Every time I switched from a solar system to another one, the game decided to load up. Load what, I have no idea. I don’t see why it didn’t just load up the planet I went to, it isn’t like the view from the cockpit window changed. A third irritant is Seth Green’s character, Joker. Really, why is his character in this game? Yes, we needed an amazing pilot to be a member of the Normandy’s crew, but why did we need someone cracking lame jokes and just otherwise pissing us off throughout the game? Finally, the motivations of many of the characters are inconsistent. In some instances, they seem to be adamant in behaving in one manner or another and suddenly change their minds without any rhyme or reason. I would have liked to see some better character development in the minor characters.
Mass Effect is a game full of could-have-beens. It story could have been great, but it relied too much on clichés. The gameplay could have been great, but the Mako went and shot it in the face. The sound could have been great, if I could have heard what the characters were saying. The graphics could have been great, except for that darned pop-in problem. Mass Effect is a serviceable game and there is plenty of fun to be had, just be prepared to be frequently slapped in the face by how inconsistent everything is. Mass Effect is a resoundingly average game in every aspect, which is a complete letdown given BioWare’s history.
