Mass Effect Review
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The game is a technical masterpiece. Well, most of the time anyway. From the way characters move to how realistic their facial expressions are, Mass Effect is one of the prettiest games out right now. The combat effects are spectacular, as are most of the environmental effects and the locales you visit. Long forgotten ruins, high tech space stations, you name it it all looks great. once the game has finished loading the scene. In order to avoid minute long loading times Bioware decided to use streaming technology. The result are frequent pauses as you run around, 30 seconds long elevator rides as the game prepares the next area and most annoyingly texture pop in. You probably saw this phenomenon in Gears of War or other Unreal based games the game loads the basic geometry of the level and then applies high resolution textures on the fly. The result is ugly ass looking levels for the first few seconds after loading a map or instant travelling there. Sure, a few seconds doesn't sound like much, but when you add that to the constant hitching and framerate drops the picture is all but nice.
At least the audio front makes up for the issues. It seems that Bioware hired a small nation to do the voiceovers for this game every single conversation you have has its unique voiceover, and even more importantly, the speakers don't tend to repeat themselves. You will never stumble upon a merchant who has the same (or very similar) voice to another merchant you met a few minutes back no sir, every one of the hundreds of NPCs sounds unique. To top it off, they all sound real and the lip-synching is perfect. The music is great also. It is reminiscent of 80s synth pieces which made movies like Blade Runner and Terminator so great. There are obviously some more dramatic pieces in there as well, but for the better part of the game the music has that futuristic sound that we all love.
