If the first three hours of the game is anything to go by, this game has far more potential than any other released during the year. Mass Effect balances out almost every genre within it and embodies a wonderful experience which might just lead to starvation and heavy sleep deprivation because you’d never want to get hooked off it. Hey it happened to me, I held my pee for two straight hours because the story had me in rapt attention right from the minute go.
I honestly had zero expectations from the Mass Effect game even though I knew BioWare was on it. I was of the view they’d end up mish mashing the whole thing and I expected this game to garner, at the most a cult following, but I was wrong to the hilt.
I still remember the day I saw the introduction to Metal Gear Solid 2. Phew!!! I had the same sense of exultation within me with every moment with Mass Effect. The game starts off with a distress signal from a human colony called Eden Prime to the Alliance military and is intercepted by The Normandy a stealth ship of the Alliance using drive technology. Captain John Shepard along with the rest of the crew is sent out to investigate the happenings on the planet, which they believe is the doing of “Geth”. a humanoid race which had been presumed to have gone into isolation.
When you select a new game from the campaign mode, the first screen allows you customize your character completely with a great amount of detail, including your first name, and progresses onto the missions. I completed close to two acts in the game and found most of the activities/actions were quite similar to KOTOR, but the whole speech system and dialogue system was the best innovation when it comes to pushing boundaries of interactivity, although the lip syncing isn’t quite what it was touted to be. But trust me with so many things going on within the game this is hardly a thing to notice.
Missions are structured in such a way that the balance between action and exploration is almost perfect. The exploration bits rely heavily on conversations, which is the best part because when you talk to characters in the game, they finally speak to you. It’s just not paragraphs of lines and lines, and you can react to them accordingly turning the tide of the conversation from a normal to an argumentative one. Remember the Codec conversations in Metal Gear, your support staff would give you tons of information and talk about a variety of subjects, this is quite similar with the NPC’s in the game they give a lot of detail about the plot of the game as well the galaxy you reside within. The sheer amount of detail in every conversation that I experienced in that short span was phenomenal and going by the initial reviews these bits get bigger with every passing moment.
This system of conversation is the game’s biggest asset in narrating the epic story, think back to the days of Metal Gear Solid, why could you never put the controller down, millions would shout gameplay, but I believe it’s the essence of the story. The plot held its ground and forced players to unlock the mystery surrounding the characters and Metal Gear. Cut to Mass Effect, the game wastes no time in dilly-dallying around and thrusts the player straight into action. A war is coming and at the end the very existence of humanity is being questioned. Sounds a lot like Halo doesn’t it, well if Halo is “The Da Vinci code”, this is “Lord of the Rings”.
The beginning of the story does not disguise its villain; you know a Turian named Saren is behind the attack on Eden and is attempting to unlock the universe’s most dangerous secret. Captain Shepard has a vision in the very beginning mission of the game which shows the complete destruction of mankind. Players can actually choose the way to describe the vision, one of them is A Neo-ish reply from the Matrix, with so many choices this feeling is way better than a puppet master, and the NPC’s actually react to according to these choices, being sarcastic in the middle of a serious conversation will elicit a different response than being rude or normal.
Choices play a huge role in the game and it is the story that holds the player to make choices like in real life. (Plot spoiler) At the council where Saren is being tried for betrayal, I chose to interrupt the conversation and vented out what was going through my mind at that moment, even though I was regarded as being disrespectful to the council, I hardly cared. Remember Metal Gear Solid 3 where the BOSS woops your arse each time you confront her in the beginning, and you could do nothing about it since it was a cutscene, here you have full control over the conversational cutscenes although it is restricted to that it still feels quite satisfying. You create the monster/angel who can finally voice out his/her feelings.
Getting onto the action front, the games combat system is pretty basic and un-complicated on the surface; shooting and cover mechanics are similar to Gears of War. You can direct squad mates in the field of battle and even can even select their equipment; at this particular scenario I choose to be in the midst of combat with my two-squad mates (I was in the beginning of the game) being at sniper and assault positions, and they filled in their jobs quite well.
The RPG elements come into play post combat where you get experience point that you can choose to divide amongst you and your squadmates, the auto level up function from KOTOR returns to distribute points evenly. There are also six character classes to mould the central character in, so a lot of traditional RPG elements are seen throughout the game. Combat expands when the player acquires Biotic and tech powers and you can practically upgrade every weapon in the game. The Paragon & Renegade (Good and bad choices) help unlocking more conversation bubbles.
The A.I. is rather good, they know when to run for cover and deploy shields on when they start taking hits, squad A.I. shows its weaknesses in certain areas but is quite consistent.
Visuals, well this is the game that truly taxes the 360’s processor. Unreal 3.0 gets prettier with each passing day it seems, from doing retro in BioShock to futuristic in Mass effect the engine seems fined tuned to cater every designers’/artists delight. The 360 however has a few issues with the game with loading times during transit which might be a tad too long than seen in games and loading and saving games. Both humans and aliens look surreal, the Krogans seem to have been carried forward from Star Wars (the Gungans).
The Codex and Journal are the vital parts in the game and is for hasty gamers who want to skip the cutscenes, although you lose out on tons of material which keeps the narrative going; the player directly knows what he is supposed to do even if he skips the conversations, which makes gameplay pretty straightforward.
So why compare this game to Metal Gear and not BioWare’s own stable of RPG’s or maybe Square or Oblivion. It’s the execution of the plot combined with so many branching gameplay options that glues the player to his screen. You don’t choose a hero someone else envisioned, you create him control him and destroy him. He is a part of you living inside the game waiting to be unleashed according to your mood.
Microsoft needs an epic that caters to a greater variety of people and this game provides the essential aspects of all games, RPG addicts, action addicts, story buffs, graphical whores, there is enough meat to satiate everyone guys.
“Mass” is used to describe something which involves a very large number of people and “Effect” is a change caused in a person or thing. If there is a sci-fi game you are waiting to pick up this season let it be this game.
–Neelesh Mukherjee