Dave Kemick

Alright so I figured I play enough games I might as well write about them. So today for the first time I’m introducing a new feature here, called Buy, Borrow, or Bury. Basically I’ve decided to circumvent all of the game-review sites to give my simple review. I’ll say whether a game is worth your money, whether you should rent it, or whether it’s to be avoided completely. For the first installment I’m going to review the sci-fi epic Mass Effect.

Mass Effect can be a long game, or it can be a short game. If you blast through just the story missions you can make it through in around 10 hours maximum. If you hang around and do all of the side missions and explore each planet thoroughly (including talking to all inhabitants) you can spend 40+ hours with Mass Effect before you watch the credits roll. Now, to some people, that sounds awesome. They see 40+ hours and think “Wow, that’s a lot of bang for my buck!” I’m here to tell you it’s not.
I like to give games a fair shake, so I generally do my best to try out everything a game has to offer so that I can judge it fairly as a whole. That’s exactly what I did with Mass Effect. I believe it took me 41 hours to complete, which includes completing every side mission and exploring all worlds as thoroughly as I found possible. With all that said please learn from my mistakes and, if you ever play Mass Effect, just breeze through the story-related missions and leave all of the side stuff alone. They’ll lure you in with false promises of extended knowledge of the Mass Effect universe and access to beautiful worlds. Don’t believe it! The side quests in Mass Effect are absolutely atrocious, and I sort of ended up hating the game because of them.

As I said I spent 41 hours playing the game, 6 of which were spent doing the main story missions of the game. For the most part those missions were fun and intriguing enough to keep me interested. The side missions on the other hand are just the same thing over and over and over. All of the “beautiful planets” are literally exactly the same just skinned a different color with maybe a different weather pattern. That’s about it. In Mass Effect you’ll find yourself exploring the same exact cave on 10 different planets, raiding the same exact space station in 10 different solar systems, and so on. The side missions in my opinion were just tacked on in order to impress people with all of the gameplay hours you can get out of the game. They neglect to inform the gamer dropping $60 on the game though, that all of this extra content is just rehashed filler.

Okay so the big part’s out of the way, but what about the fundamentals of the game? Story-wise Mass Effect is competant. It’s basically pretty generic sci-fi stuff but if you’re into Star Wars or “The Trek” you’ll probably dig the story. I’m only a mild Star Wars enthusiast and I don’t really go crazy for sci-fi but I still found myself interested in the story. The combat in the game isn’t great, it’s terrible. It’s there. It serves it’s purpose. The squad elements of the game can range from completely frustrating (when your under-powered squadmates only serve as cannon fodder for the enemy, leaving you with the arduous task of resurrecting them 10 times per battle) to an almost non-issue. By the end of the game my squadmates rarely died and to be honest I flew through battles without any problems at all. I suppose it could be said that I was overpowered at that point (I ended the game at level 50).

The RPG elements are well enough. Pretty standard stuff again here, with basic skill trees that you pimp out as you gain levels in the game. The gear you find is sort of stock, nothing looks amazing because it’s all meant to simulate what actual gear would look like in the future going for realism over prettiness, so I can’t hate on them there. The inventory system? Pretty terrible. You’ll find yourself searching through lists of dozens of items one at a time to find the weapon or piece of armor you’re looking for. It’s pretty frustrating. Another frustrating thing about the game is the checkpoint system, or the lack of one. It’s not uncommon for a player to lose an hour of gameplay as a result of not saving the game…obviously that’s unacceptable. This is 2008, people have been getting saving systems right in games for a long time. How hard could it be to integrate a useful checkpoint system?

Where the game does shine though, is in character building. One of the biggest draws to this game, as funny as it sounds, is the discussions you’ll have with in-game characters. The conversation system Bioware has integrated into the game is top-knotch and is one of the best ways I’ve seen to communicate with in-game NPC’s ever. It works by presenting you with a list of possible responses to whatever the person you’re talking to is saying, and then you can pick your response on the fly before they’ve even finished what they’re saying. What this does is let you have seamless conversations that almost playout like dialogue in a movie. Really good stuff there.

So in conclusion Mass Effect runs the gamut from completely maddening to somewhat promising. The fact that only 6 of the 41 hours I played where anything good makes me really resent the game though, especially for all of the hype and buzz it received. Even at its best Mass Effect is pretty mediocre. If you’re a sci-fi fan I’d say borrow Mass Effect from a friend (or a rental shop) and see if you can stand it before dropping $60. Otherwise bury it.

Thanks for reading this review and if you have any feedback (if you really liked Mass Effect, for example) or if you think I should or shouldn’t continue to review games, leave a comment with your thoughts or send me an email at dmkemick(at)live(dot)com. Thanks!