Mass Effect Review

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Written by BuckGB on December 7th, 2007

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Another complaint is graphical stability: you will experience tearing and frame rate slowdowns. Even in scenes as simple as a character's face, moving their head while speaking causes screen tearing. It's distracting and perplexing. Like other Unreal Engine games, textures are also exceptionally slow in loading. It's not much of a problem visually in the early going, but in the fireworks finale of the game's conclusion, which contains very quick cuts from scene to scene, textures never get properly loaded, leaving only muddled, low-definition blobs of color on background surfaces.

Finally, the side-quest locations all take place in one of three different types of building on uncharted planets. It makes sense from a technical perspective (i.e., pre-fabricated buildings that can exist in a vacuum might be rare and only made by a couple companies), but as a gameplay element, it's bad design; you'll be fighting your way through the same mine/building/underground bunker on every world. Very disappointing. On the whole, Mass Effect feels unoptimized almost the entire way, like BioWare shipped a beta version of the game and not the final product. It needs some polish and some tweaking in a bad way.

Ultimately, however, the entire experience is overwhelmingly more positive than negative

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