Mass Effect : XBox 360
I first played Mass Effect a year and a half ago. I played for about two hours, found the combat frustratingly difficult and gave up, much to the surprise of one of my friends who assured me I’d love it. A year and a half later, and I’ve played a lot more games where shooting a gun from a third-person viewpoint is the norm and my skill at such has greatly improved and so I decided to dig back into Mass Effect to see whether or not I’d really been missing out on something great. I had.
Mass Effect is still the hardest game to get into that I’ve played in years. The combat system, twinning RPG elements with a third-person shooter, is unforgiving at the beginning (when you are a weedy, unskilled idiot) and the lack of any hand-holding is also very difficult to get to grips with when you are new to the game idea. Even on my attempt I felt like giving up, having no idea how the abilities worked, no understanding of how to fly the ship, or decode a lock, and then being thrown into a universe with so much depth that it was impossible to juggle all the new information being thrown out in a short space of time. It feels like a bombardment and it’s all too easy to give up and walk away, but I was convinced I’d enjoy it if I pushed through and I was right. I learned to save regularly, I learned to read every bit of info it did give me and not just skip on past, I learned to stop and take stock at many of the early opportunities and slowly I begun to understand this game. I even read the manual.
‘Getting’ Mass Effect is a key which unlocks a wonderful game. There was one point where I sat back, thought nostalgically to playing Elite and Frontier and realised that this game was the one I had always wanted to play. Quite without realising it, I’d been waiting to play Mass Effect for over twenty years and that was when it clicked.
There are flaws in this magnificent game, and I’ll touch on those first because I want to get them out of the way and be fair: there’s far too much repetition - repetition of graphics, of side mission layouts, of similar fights - and it is this repetition which prevents the side missions from being as fun as they could be; it became a case of done a few, done them all. There are some graphical problems with a lot of pop-in with the textures which ends up being quite amusing, the ‘autosave’ system is a joke (it doesn’t save anything like often enough, and you have to save yourself pretty much before every encounter, just in case) and occasionally there is an ‘oh, you died and there was nothing you could have done about it’ moment (yes, Thresher Maws, I’m looking right at ya). These are minor niggles though, because there really is little to complain about with this game.
Moments of pure brilliance exist within Mass Effect, from the facial hair on the main character’s face (assuming you play as a man, not a woman; I doubt she has great facial hair graphics), through the intuitive and easy to understand conversation system, across the lovely and exciting storyline and not forgetting the overall atmosphere. Much as it is frustratingly hard to get into, Mass Effect is also particularly rewarding when you do understand how it works; ploughing points into using a sniper rifle and then popping the enemies from a ridiculous distance, for example, makes all that time at the beginning when trying to be a long-range assassin was a lesson into what it must be like to have zero hand-eye coordination very much worthwhile.
Of course, it is hard to discuss Mass Effect without mentioning BioWare as a whole and then, end up comparing this game to Dragon Age: Origins. DAO came afterwards and comes off very unfavourably in my view, something about the atmosphere of Mass Effect just works better. The conversations flow a little nicer, the characters are less obvious and the fact that DAO is steeped in overused classic elf/dwarf fantasy does it no favours. I think, if I am to be honest though, it is the fact that I was successful in wooing the girl in Mass Effect whereas DAO was a massive failure on that score for me. Everything I said that was wrong about that interaction in Dragon Age was right here, the conversations I had and the outcome of them felt utterly natural and when the moment came where my efforts came to a conclusion, it was justified and engaging, helping the plot and story along rather than hindering it in any way. There’s a lot of skill in the BioWare studios and while I may have been horribly disappointed by the way it all panned out in their fantasy series, the sci-fi one hits the target without even showing effort.
Part of me feels I should write more, that I should spend time rating the game on its graphics and sound and storyline like a ‘real’ review, but I’m not going to. Mass Effect reminded me that games aren’t just there to complete and review, as if it were a job -no, games are there for our entertainment and, if they can, to try to touch us emotionally, tell a fine story and be something which makes us smile to remember. As I said earlier, Mass Effect was the game I’d been subconsciously waiting over two decades to play and it was great to finally play it.
