Mass Effect Reviews

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Written by BuckGB on March 25th, 2008

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Mass Effect's depth of choices follows into combat, which some may view as a disappointment at first. It plays like any standard third-person shooter would, with four rather basic weapon types, a Gears of War-like cover system, and some limited squad commands for your two not-especially-intelligent comrades. It's familiar enough that most will treat it like a generic third-person shooter, simply because they won't know better.

Well, silly me, that's exactly what I did, and I was initially left with an empty feeling. But a second play-through which Mass Effect richly rewards demonstrated to me just how flexible my options in battle were. After raising the difficulty, my relentless foes forced me to take tactical action and utilize my many biotic and tech abilities, every one of which could be upgraded and improved with a little experience farming. No longer were battles simple run-of-the-mill shooter fare. I took pleasure in using my Force-like biotic powers to push enemies over the edges of cliffs. I lifted my foes helplessly into the air and made easy targets of them. I hacked into the circuits of the synthetic geth troops and forced them to fire on each other instead of me. And I was having a blast.

We tend to measure the worth of our RPGs in terms of hours spent scouring them for every last experience point, so eyebrows were certainly raised at the fact that Bring Down The Sky lasts - at best - an hour and a half. Such brevity would be fine if it were crammed with unmissable storytelling and innovative action, but what's most disappointing is that not only does this new mini-story fail to deliver much in the way of narrative excitement during that time, but that most of the gameplay revolves around sluggish Mako tank combat, hopping and blasting the stupid amount of gun turrets surrounding the three thrusters being used to propel the asteroid. That disappointment deepens when you realise that the three outposts controlling the thrusters all use the same old base map you'll have grown sick of during the rest of the game. Of all the things I hoped would be changed for the downloadable content, the off-putting map repetition was top of the list. So, boo.

Also inducing sighs and shrugs is the lack of any real narrative meat. There's minimal NPC interaction, and the motives behind the asteroid attack are vague at best. This is really just a medium-sized combat-heavy side-quest that, had it been squeezed into the main game, wouldn't have had many players rushing to check it out. Despite the compelling race-against-time concept, there's no game-clock running - probably because disaster looms in four hours in-game, but you can finish the mission in a quarter of that in real time. So instead of plot twists and role-playing, it's just blast, blast, blast, drive, drive, drive, blast, blast, blast. There are 50 Gamerpoints to be earned, but they just come at the end in one chunk, regardless of the options you choose. There's therefore no incentive to seek out the handful of smaller objectives in the mission, or investigate every corner of the map.

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