Game Review: Mass Effect

While I've played precious little of this title, I can say it is definitely worthwhile.

In the early days of Club Silicon, this newsletter would have provided one of perhaps half a dozen reviews at this point, most of which would be in print. However thanks to web magic, most CS readers will have read about or played Mass Effect. Therefore I shall provide information on what the reviewers have not covered.

Mass Effect, in effect, is...?

First, the obvious, just in case there are those of you who haven't heard of or played this title. Mass Effect is a science fiction role playing game focusing on deeper combat gameplay, a more compelling story, and more beautiful graphics than has ever been achieved in gaming. Bioware, the game's deveoper, has achieved this for the most part. This game could be taken very seriously by people in Hollywood as a solid bit of entertainment, but with player control. Bioware is famous for its taking the genre to new heights, and Mass Effect is no exception.

RPG staples, oldies but goodies

The player can customize their character to their hearts desire, making them a man or woman, even choosing responses to various conversations. They can choose to evoke biotechnology (the equivalent of magic), weapons skill (go in shooting), or technology skills (hack your way through life) to achieve their goals. Similar elements pioneered by such games as System Shock and Deus Ex. The storyline and world is truly vast, with the environments being rendered on a level of detail that is truly astounding. You can see the glint of reflection on realistic rivers and oceans of water down to small pores and hairs on character faces. The science fiction aspect is rendered in intricate detail but also with breathtaking futuristic beauty. In short, this is a gorgeous game that will leave your mouth gaping open, especially in high definition on a big screen.

Fight!

Combat is fairly well handled, weapons and strategies are plentiful. This is a truly hi tech version (with advances in many areas) of the best RPG traditions of old and what made them more mainstream (less rolling dice, more game choice and more instant satisfaction to develop a character) all around.

What does it sound like?

Oh yes, and the sound, VO and music? The sound effects are capable, lacking in some areas such as realtime VO being mixed too low to hear above cinematic VO levels, but the design is excellent. The weapons sound unique, appropriately futuristic and well balanced. The VO ranges from pretty good (such Captain Anderson, voiced by Keith David), to mediocre (Seth Green), and the pacing is well done. The music is my favorite aspect. It is sublime and nearly flawless (to paraphrase The Matrix: Revolutions). Written by Jack Wall with additional music by Sam Hulick, Richard Jaques and David Kates, it is very Vangelis in style, carefully blending orchestral in the minority with synthesis in the majority. It just plain ends up sounding beautifully, as though it belonged playing in your head as you read all those Isaac Asimov novels. While it is unlikely since the soundtrack is for sale, I'm going to see if Jack can get me a clip of the music to download here.

Cons

The downside is mainly trying to keep the player interested is a tough task. There's an awful lot of choice with little bang for the buck achieving minor goals (such as advancing various missions, some of which don't even show up in your journal). But even more so is the facial animation, particularly the lip syncing. These characters mostly look incredible, with Shepard, the player character, leading the pack. But when they talk, all bets are off and the realism stops right there. I'm very much hoping this paves the way for new paradigms that don't bucher lines that are pretty carefully delivered that you can ALMOST take seriously were it not for lip movement that convinces you you're watching a foreign film.

Summary, please

All in all Mass Effect is an incredible RPG. It does have its down sides, as mentioned (oh, did I mention there really isn't much exploration in non-hub combat worlds, and very little, if any, in the way of transitional gameplay between planets and hubs?), but the beauty of the environments as well as a story that really does keep you involved goes a long way. Pick it up!

Comments

[suneel]

well its only for the ms shit-box version :(

[Alex]

Wow, strong opinion, Suneel. :) What makes the Xbox a pile of excrement, exactly?

[suneel]

here is my reasoning for the x-bashing

[Low QOS]
1. primarily designed to maximize profits, thus inversely proportional to quality
1 Increased profits attract more employment
2 More employment means, tasks become more generic
3 More generic means, specialization for the field goes down
4 So the focus shift from game creation to game management
5 Title generation process increases with some minor random variations (sigma=0.001)
6 Hence increasing the system entropy! Ugh
Thus confirming the thermodynamic law that entropy/randomness/chaos of a system
always increases with time. : (
7 After surplus is achieved, motivation for creation decreases exponentially,
since primary target of profit maximization has been met

=> But then what about creativity/expression and originality?
2. Sacrifices made to the game due to cross platform porting

[Naïve Audience]
1. Target audience is for small kids, teenagers & some adults who are not very creative
2. Easy to please this audience ( please see pt 1.5 )
3. Hence gameplay/ideas are stagnant or progress in minuscule delta-dx amounts
=> But what about smart kids/teenager who actually think want more?

[Wasteful Approach]
1. Console formats are not portable
2. Unrealistic prices
3. Design is backward, all parts have to be replaced for next generation
4. Computing resources abundant/aplenty in computers, why not develop an
interface with the pc via wifi connetors?

hmmm...thats about it, i guess i will go back and tweak my nord modular now ;)

by the way happy holidays alex! :)

[Mike Sowden]

Can't agree with you on most of those points, suneel. (No, I don't own one, but I've used one). Especially when you mention 'target audience' - are you basing this on the slick front-end? If so, I'd argue they're going down the tried and tested Nintendo route of making things very bright, primary-coloured and instantly accessible, and there are those that are going to label that 'for kiddies', which is like saying all Anime is also for kiddies....

Also - I don't think it's in Microsoft's best interest to blur the lines between PCs and Xboxes. Sure, it's happening already as a subculture, but I can't see them wanting it officially. They want something manageably stand-alone for support purposes, surely. Even an interface might be seen as a chink in this armour.

Also - :) - all of the intial points you raised are to do with the games industry in general, surely. Not Xbox-360's fault specifically. But I agree that overcommercialisng the industry stinks.

Anyhoo.

.....

Bioware can do no wrong, like Irrational Games ('Bioshock'). I've been waiting for this baby for a long time. Although.....I do wish they'd go a bit more uncompromisingly hardcore RPG again, a la 'Baldur's Gate II'). Just once more.

[Alex]

Suneel, I agree with several of your comments, especially unrealistic pricing and the console formats requiring a unique system for an entire segment of platform specific titles.

However, I do have to disagree about the target audience being small kids. I have two small kids and to be honest even if I was 8 years old most of the Xbox games wouldn't appeal to me the way that Wii games would. My parents wouldn't have let me play Halo 3, for example, but they had no issue with Asteroids or Super Mario Bros.

Also, more employment doesn't mean more generic. Specialization leads to more focus in specific areas. An easy example is producers who think they know everything about game audio, or more appropriately, ones who assume they know everything. A lot tends to get missed, unless the producer is a super audiophile (which in some cases is true, but rarely). In such cases they hire an audio director, like me ;)

Even more importantly, animation! Folks might think "eh, 4 or 5 animators will be enough!", but man, this really isn't true for an RPG these days.

Anyway, I know quite a few PC aficionados who don't go near consoles for many good reasons, some of which you mention, but it might be emotion partially that drives your responses. Call me crazy, but I'd wait a few years. The PC will be back on top soon enough as a viable platform.

[suneel]

@mike
>are you basing this on the slick front-end? If so, I'd argue they're going down the tried and tested >Nintendo route of making things very bright, primary-coloured and instantly accessible, and there are >those that are going to label that 'for kiddies',
no i am talking about content not packaging

>all of the intial points you raised are to do with the games industry in general, surely. Not >Xbox-360's fault specifically.
mike but the game industry in general is 80% console and 20% from the profits. $4.7 billion=>console, $953 million=>pc

>which is like saying all Anime is also for kiddies....
LOL, ok different view then. the only person whome i knew was into anime was my Japanese roomate (nice guy) a long time back.

@alex
>However, I do have to disagree about the target audience being small kids.
he he what i was trying to say was, the experience on console(xclude wii's) is not as immersive compared to pc's.

>Also, more employment doesn't mean more generic. Specialization leads to more focus in specific >areas.
maybe true, but looking at the game industry we see the increase in the emergence of dull titles by our large game corp's

>An easy example is producers who think they know...ones who assume they know everything, lot tends >to get missed unless the producer is a super audiophile
nice point you brought up there. this is a huge topic to discuss, so i wont even go in that direction. but on a related note, sound, which in general is light years away compared to advancement in video technology, despite the availability of hardware like x-fi. Efforts to use x-ram/spatial effects/hiquality-voices are not invested by devs because consoles donot have these capabilities. So in fact nothing much has happened since eax2 since 1999! Thats 7 valauble years from the short human lifespan

i think i will stop here because i think i am going a mass-momentum away from mass-effect

[Rhynri]

having played the PC version (in glorious 2560x1600 and with all the extra pc-only graphics tweaks) I have to say they must have finessed many of the problems with the 360 version out, because my first thought on the lipsync was "damn, that's good". It's great that Demios made such a good port. The GOW port was also pretty well done (it looks a LOT better than the 360 version, especially with the DX10 effects) but the interface still had xbox buttons and "live" sign-in, and such. Which kinda sucked.