Retrospective: Mass Effect

Hang on, this is a long one:

Anyone who knows me knows that I have a particular contempt for the game Mass Effect for the Xbox 360. I don't think that I have the space or the time here to get into all of my reasons for disliking this game as much as I do, suffice to say that it is not as a whole a necessarily bad game, it just isn't everything BioWare and Microsoft said it would be.

Another history lesson for those not in the know: BioWare was originally a medical software company started more than a decade ago in Canada. Not satisfied with what they were doing, they changed gears and began manufacturing video games, and it turns out that they were actually good at it. Some of their past lauded works include MDK2, Baulder's Gate for the PC, Neverwinter Nights for the PC, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic for the PC and Xbox. I should point out at this point that I have played and like all of these games, but SW:KOTOR is the most important one for this discussion.

KOTOR came out back when I was working at GameStop, then called Electronics Boutique. I didn't have the opportunity to play it back then as it was delayed endlessly, and the video demo that my company sent to us wasn't very reassuring; looking back now I believe that it was early development footage, even before they had finalized the textures or added enemies. When I finally did start playing it years later in college, it took me awhile to get into it. I had been playing Bethesda's Morrowind for quite some time at that time, and even today I feel that Morrowind is the mold in which I like my single-player RPGs, with lots of exploration, NPCs to talk to, and customizable weapons and armor. I have no gripes with Morrowind, so don't expect to see it here any time soon.

Back to KOTOR: Although different from Bethesda's opus it was still a solid single-player RPG. It had great graphics, solid gameplay, character customization, a great story, familiar character archetypes, lots of secrets, and OBSCENELY TERRIBLE LOADING TIMES. Even for a first generation Xbox game, the loading times were about the worst I had (or have) ever seen on a console, making the game that much less fun to play, but not so much that it was unplayable or not fun; KOTOR was a really polished diamond with some disappointingly rough edges.

(I'll cover Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II in a later column - there's just too much to hate about that game, and it wasn't even developed by BioWare so complaining about it now is a moot point.)

What does all of this have to do with Mass Effect, one might ask? Mass Effect is in many ways a direct sequel to KOTOR. It has the same character archetypes, the same weapons and armor customization, and a very similar setting. Some characters even have force powers that are almost exactly like the force powers in KOTOR, but with the distinction here that they're called "Biotics." You and your crew fly around the galaxy in a large ship, and you can find and add more members to your crew. BioWare has effectively "borrowed" every single aspect of this game from KOTOR save for the license. As a matter of fact, they seem to have left some things out...

... like quality control.

Every single one of Mass Effect's over-hyped selling points are also what make the game seem less like fun and more like a chore due to glitches, bugs, and design choices that range from poor to just plain lazy. Don't bother looking for any of these online - BioWare's marketing team has made it a point to show you only the more developed areas of the game, though they will make it seem like they have just gone to some random location.

Well, let's get to it:

GRAPHICS: Go online anywhere and take a look at the still images. Don't they look pretty? There's a reason, and that reason is because they are static. I can't speak for the PC version of the game, but the Xbox 360 version is one of the worst-looking games I have ever played, for a number of reasons.

Foremost in my opinion is the way that textures "pop" into the environments as they load. This happens in many other games, but usually when the initial load is done you don't see it again. In Mass Effect, this happens all of the time in the more detailed environments - and when I say all of the time I mean every time your character changes his or her view. This also contributes to the frame-rate being one of the worst that I've ever seen on the 360, and the environments aren't even that big or detailed. One would think that this defect would be to cut down on loading times - but no! This game's loading times are almost as bad as the last-generation KOTOR's... and there are more loading areas!

The facial animation is pretty good, though there are only a few races (4) that actually give any expression. Speaking of races, almost every race has only one character model that is changed for different characters by adjusting height, color, etc. Here they are:

Asari (female)
Human (male)
Human (female)
Krogan (male)
Salarian (male)
Turian (male)

Sharing the same character model (all characters look exactly the same) and no facial animations are the following:
Elcor (male)
Geth (androgynous enemies)
Hanar (unisex)
Keepers (unisex)
Quarian (female, only one seen)
Volus (male)

(NOTE: I left out the Batarians because they are an expansion race and I'm never buying the expansion for this piece of crap game)

As far as the movement animations go, all of the characters look like they have steel rods shoved up their space-butts so far that it should be sticking out of the tops of their heads. The run (or rather "jog") cycle is hilarious - it's almost like watching a speed-walker in action. The Quarian female looks as though she's supposed to walk digitigrade (on her toe-tips), but she is animated walking plantigrade like all of the other humanoids, so her race is so advanced that they can ignore biology and physics.

Oh well, at least the facial animations are good, if not understated...

STORY: Humans are expanding their presence in the galaxy, and the first human operative of an elite galactic agency has just been named: You. The player takes the role of Shepard, a war hero/survivor of a galactic attack/S.O.B. who is the first of the "Spectres," a brotherhood of lawmen who are above it and only answer to the galaxy's highest leaders. On his first mission Shepard is betrayed by another Spectre, and from that point on the words, "Don't worry, we'll get Saren - no matter what!" will be uttered throughout the galaxy as the dialog tends to get recycled throughout the game.

Complicating matters, Saren has allied himself with bio-mechanical beings who are trying to resurrect an ancient race of robots who will wipe out all sentient life in the galaxy, but twenty hours into the game this wasn't explored sufficiently enough for me to care.

I didn't play the game all the way through, so I can't really comment on any twists in the story. If you like television shows like CSI and Law and Order you will probably find the storyline intriguing. If you don't you will be as bored as I was.

SOUND: Lots of talking. Decent voice acting, although there is so much dialog it's like the actors lost a lot of their zeal when delivering so many lines.

The music is bland, but as it's supposed to mimic the new age-like sound of early 80s sci-fi movies it is appropriate.

CONTROL: Very poorly thought out. The game is a mesh of role playing game (like Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion) and tactical third-person shooter (like Ghost Recon Advanced Warfare or Gears of War), but falls short of performing either satisfyingly.

In GRAW and GOW, there is a button that the player pushes to take cover. In Mass Effect the player's character automatically takes cover whenever close to a wall... most of the time. Not all surfaces will do this; some that should, don't, and some that shouldn't, do. Once, my Shepard died because I was low on health and had to retreat down a narrow hallway, only to have the character get stuck on a wall. When I pulled away from said wall, I would get stuck on the opposite one. This went on until my character was dead from enemy fire.

There also isn't a jump button in the game, even though the game is purportedly in actual 3D and not in "mock 3D" like KOTOR. There are times that my character got stuck between a small rock and a survey flag, the only way around which was that I had to reset the game. The "Mako" vehicle in the game can jump, which makes it frustrating that the main character can't.

These problems become hot spots of volcanic rage when one realizes that the developer mapped two buttons for drawing a weapon - one to draw it, one to put it away. THIS IS INEXCUSABLE! Why would they waste two buttons for that when there is so much else in the game that needs fixing or greater control? Other buttons aren't mapped to where you would think they would be mapped and you CAN'T CHANGE THAT, and this makes the game hard to learn. The usual argument developers make, "because we want all the controls to be the same for all players in multi player" (which by the way is complete bullshit in the day and age of custom gamer tags) is moot because it is a single player game! What else can I add? Oh yes - on the game's menus change the button configuration between pages, meaning that the button to go "back" in one page will exit the menu entirely on another, or turn a weapon into "omni-gel" before you have a chance to examine it. Man, I hate BioWare!

The A.I. help you are given is more like A.S. (Artificial Stupidity). They act like anyone would in a gunfight; they stand out in the open forcing the player to heal them, then get in the way when the player has to retreat. Supposedly they take cover when told to, but they never seem to go where I tell them to... In the early demos, the player was able to take direct control of these gimps to put them where they were supposed to go, but this was taken out quietly before the game was released.

Since we're on the subject of shitty control, let's address the "Mako," the worst vehicle ever put in a video game. Not only can you not customize or upgrade the stupid thing, its primary function - navigating the rocky surface of the ho-hum planets in the game - is hindered by the fact that it sucks at climbing hills. While it can jump, it can't jump high enough to actually get over obstacles, and using the jump jets on the side of a hill won't propel the Mako over it (like one would expect), but rather sends it off the side of the incline onto its back, damaging the thing slightly. The Mako's armor is also questionable - small arms fire will deplete the force field and armor in a matter of seconds, getting touched by a "Thresher Maw" monster will destroy it, but a half mile plunge off of a mountain with no attempt at activating the jump jets will at most slightly damage one tire. If the jets would face the rear of the vehicle where they could actually give it a boost for jumps on inclines it would make sense, but that's more sense than the developer had.

Controlling the Mako is a migraine in itself, because you will spend more than half of the time in the vehicle looking at the underside of it, thanks to remarkably bad camera control. Using the gun turret is easy on totally flat land - its too bad enemy encounters only happen in hilly areas where backing onto a slight incline will put the camera view on the tires and off of the enemies. When one finally does manipulate the camera to see the enemies, the gun will fire on the hills behind the bad guys even when the reticule is directly over top of them - its far easier to get out of the Mako and take on bad guys on foot, but don't use the Mako for cover - when it explodes after the third enemy bullet it will kill you!

GAMEPLAY: Very formulaic. From the original footage shown early on, the Mass Effect development team would have one believe that the galaxy the game takes place in is nearly limitless in size, with dozens of explorable solar systems with tens of explorable planets each. THIS IS A LIE! Let me break it down...

While there are dozens of explorable solar systems:
1.) Each solar system only has one planet that the player can visit, all other planets give a description of what one would find there and what it would look like (usually a paragraph or two that is almost always more interesting than the planets that are actually in the game).
2.) Each planet has one type of terrain (rocky) in different colors that the player can explore roughly one square mile of - if the player goes outside of that, the game is over.
3.) There is no indigenous vegetation and I only ever found one planet that had life forms on it (cow-like creatures that you couldn't interact with). Very boring to look at.
4.) Apparently, outside of the Shepard's ship there is only one other type of spaceship in the universe, and it is roughly the size of a mobile home.
5.) There are three types of structures in the entire universe: A two-story box, an underground bunker, and a cave. They always have the same layout; convenient, as you'll never get lost inside them.

So there you have it - since most planets are essentially the same collection of ores, enemies, and the Thresher Maw (a monster so diabolical that it can come back from the dead right after exploding due to lazy programming), there are about six-to-eight total locations in the game, making exploration moot.

Also, I have a hard time trying to figure out why there are stores in the game.

In a good game, the store is where the player goes to buy supplies and to upgrade armor and weapons. The prices are slightly more than what one starts out with, and they offer reduced value for old weapons, which forces the player to decide what he or she wants to upgrade and what keep.

In this (not good) game, the stores have a severe disparity of values. The player starts out with no credits, and the stores want roughly 12,000 credits for items that are slightly better than what the player has equipped. The converse is that the same store will usually only offer you about 25-100 credits for the same item. This is ridiculous. Once the player starts to survey ores and get credits built up enough to buy the items in the store, they've already found better items on the planet! Why are there even stores in the game? They're a complete waste of time!

The bulk of the game is based on talking. Not exciting, decision-making talking, but boring smalltalk- filled conversation. The game often gives the player five responses to every question, whether they need it or not. A small question very quickly balloons to a ten-minute discussion where Shepard has plenty of times to spout, "I'll get you Saren, if it's the last thing I doooooo!" or at least words to that effect. Even more annoying is the fact that boss fights are preceded by a twenty-plus minute dialog, which the player will have to repeat in the likely event that they are killed by the boss.

When Shepard is killed, the player has to sit through an annoying death sequence that takes way too long to end, then sit through the too-frequently-seen loading screen, then start the level over, unless they had the foresight to save.

OVERALL: God I hate this game! I hate the fact that they made it look so good in the previews only to dump a half-developed product on the public. I hate the fact that has all of the problems that KOTOR had five years ago and actually adds to them. I hate the fact that there are small things that they could have fixed to make it better. Most of all I hate the fact that you - yes you - the buying public has almost universally declared this to be one of the best games for the Xbox 360, giving BioWare (and other developers) the fuel to dump more quick-and-dirty games on us at full price. Stop buying this crap already!