7.9
with 14 votes
Mass Effect
Mass Effect is an action role-playing game developed by BioWare for the Xbox 360 and then ported to Microsoft Windows by Demiurge Studios. The Xbox 360 edition was released worldwide in November 2007 published by Microsoft Game Studios. The Windows edition was released on May 28, 2008, published by Electronic Arts.
The game takes place in the year 2183, with the player assuming the role of an elite human soldier named Commander Shepard, set out to explore the Galaxy on a starship, the SSV Normandy.
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JDHarper
- Tagged with: 2008 | BioWare | rpg
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5 Reviews
I picked this up when it was on sale a couple weeks ago. Maybe it’s just that I played it after finishing Fallout 3, but this game feels very restrictive to me. It offers the illusion of choices, but really you’re being railroaded down the story. You just get to choose whether you get a window or aisle seat.
My other major complaint is that this game has serious technical issues on the PC. I routinely get stuttering in dialog, completely obscuring about one in every thirty dialog sequences. Worse, intense combat often slows the frame rate to a crawl, even after reducing graphics settings. I may just not have a good enough CPU, but it handles L4D2, TF2, and Fallout 3 just fine, so I have to assume it’s the game.
On the plus side, several of the characters are likable and memorable, especially Tali (the nomad alien), Wrex (the big guy), and Joker (the pilot).
Other than that, there’s no real draw for this game for me; at this point, I’m playing just to see the ending, not because the game is all that much fun. I think I would enjoy this game much more if it were a movie.
I didn’t really understand all the love for this game. I guess it’s just not my style, the dialogue trees and all, but I found it kind of boring, and didn’t bother finishing it. Ah well.
I’ve been reading up on what coming in the sequel and, while I’m glad that the shooting gameplay is getting major improvements, that’s far from what made me love this game. This kind of dialog trees shouldn’t work, but they did for me. Just bumming around the citadel talking to people was a blast and very little of it felt forced and unnatural, at lest in the context of the game. With that so well done it made me care about the shooting all the more.
And on my PC it looked fucking great, with a really cool sort of starwarsian feel to the locations and impeccable lip-syincing. It is so good.
I generally like Bioware games. They do a good job with dialog, have some intriguing characters and backstory, and they look good. Plus, hey, romance! This one even has a couple sex scenes.
But I found it a little too Star Trek. You’re a spaceship captain, pretty much a military straight arrow even if you go renegage, the environments all look like ’60s attempts to depict The Future.
I found the combat too repetitive… all the guns feel the same. And the side missions outside the Citadel are very shallow.
This is a pretty game. A pretty game that tends to run well for 20 to 30 minutes, if I’m lucky, before the audio cuts out, the graphics go wonky, or the game freezes completely. At least that saves me from wandering endlessly through dull conversations occasionally broken by long spats of difficult combat in an exceptionally linear, exploration un-friendly setting. I’m sure, at some point, I’ll get very ill while in possession of a large quantity of marijuana and absolutely nothing else to do, and I may get myself a little further in this game.