Mass Effect Reviews
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As shown in this 2006 demonstration, the combat in Mass Effect was intended to be like that in KOTOR but more action-oriented. You were supposed to be able to jump from one squad member to another, select where he or she would go, determine what they would do and then, unlike in KOTOR, be able to fire and aim their weapons in real time. That's not the game that got shipped. What was rushed out the door is an unbalanced and confusing combat system that's basic and random in nature. The enemies' AI is very poor, which wasn't worked on enough because of ... let's guess time constraints ... so shortcuts were taken. Once you get how it works (by messing around, not instructions from the game), it works well enough to be enjoyed, but it's a far cry from the dream combat system we were hoping for and promised two years ago.Gaming Nexus is a lot more positive, calling the game a "role-playing tour de force" and giving it a 9.5.
Clearly Mass Effect is not all it was promised to be, and it doesn't even meet up to its previous KOTOR days. But yet I still can't help but recommend this game to anyone who loves BioWare's games. It does deliver on many parts, such as story and music, and it gives you the feeling of being on an adventure in many strange lands and choosing your own destiny.
Once generated, the game's crux is introduced early to Commander Shepard: Conversation. Mass Effect does for conversation what Assassin's Creed does for platforming: It simplifies the user's inputs while empowering the user's affect on the surrounding terrain; and trust me, the conversational (terrain) in Mass Effect will peak and valley into some of the most beautifully-sculpted and vertigo-inducing topography ever traversed in a video game landscape. By trimming the fat from typically verbatim dialogue trees, Shepard is given general options to push or pull the conversation in one direction or the other without having to hear a voice actor repeat the lines a player just read for themselves. On the flipside, it also doesn't oversimplify to the point where simply choosing (snarky) or (nice) is sufficient player input (although the Bard's Tale is the simpler spiritual predecessor to Mass Effect's similarly brilliant implementation of in-game talky-talk).
The branching conversations, however, aren't just caricatured paths between good vs. evil. Commander Shepard does have a mission to accomplish by day's end; but it's the getting there that counts. Whether known for his benevolence and charity, or by the trail of dead, a player will have a unique connection with not only Commander Shepard, but with the crewmates that hold him in awe, or regard him with fear.
The toughest decisions -- and there are certainly more than a few earth-shattering, no-joke, past-the-point-of-no-return decisions Shepard must make -- can carry even the most pregnant pause to full term. The writers procured the type of painful conundrums that monster in complexity until you either resign to your gut reaction . or you drown in second guesses. Completely succumbing to one or the other won't save you. Or the galaxy.
