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Mass Effect

Reviewed on: PC
Available on: Playstation 2, Xbox

Anyone who enjoys RPG�s, BioWare�s previous titles or games based in space will definitely get a kick out of this game.

Players: 1 Player
Genre:
Release: 2008-11-22

Developer: BioWare
Distributor: Microsoft

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Mass Effect

News from Oracle - February 4th @ 9:03pm

Mass Effect is an Action RPG game brought to us by BioWare, the developer who is well known for their Knights of the Old Republic series and Jade Empire. Back in 2006 when first footage of Mass Effect was shown I was simply blown away. Not because of the graphics or the cut scenes but because of the idea of being in charge of a fleet and piloting your ship to any planet that you fancy.

So you can kinda guess that Mass Effect was one of my most anticipated games for 2007. So how did the journey turn out for me? Was it definitely a hit and belongs up in the best of awards with Super Mario Galaxy and Rock Band? Or is it a hit and miss and belongs into the depths of Hell with Assassins Creed and Halo 3? I'll do my best to quickly sum up this 'epic' game.

You start off by taking control of Captain Shepard, the cool thing is that you'll get to choose what Shepard looks like, what gender, what race, what class, what talents and finally if I want to listen to a woman bitch, bitch, bitch (refer to gender).

The action starts almost immediately when an incoming transmission has been intercepted by the fleet. Soldiers are under attack by an unknown race and are requesting immediate backup. Yes it's cool that the action picks up quickly, no it is not cool that the game has no tutorial on what the controls are, how to battle or even what to shoot at or not. And this to me was a huge stinker.

I�m walking on Sunshine, Wooooah

Once all that's out of the way you'll be introduced to the slow and boring section of the usual RPG game. You'll be dumped into Citadel, Alliance's biggest city and you'll be forced to meet new people and to do shitty quests like gathering bug data and calming a fighting couple down. No matter how cool the dialogue is or how awesome the character animations are there's just nothing exciting about listening to an old woman bitch about her dead brother.. or something� I stopped paying attention and watched some guy continuously walk into a wall in the background.

During this brain dead process you'll be bumping into friendly faces who are willing to join your party, within the first 3 hours of the game you'll have more than half of your party members collected� quick huh? Well yes,- if you focus on the main quests in the game you'll be finished by 9:00pm that evening. But if you've got the patience to put up with the mindless unrewarding side quests then you'll have another 10 hours under your belt.

For those of you who haven't played the game just yet please take note - save, save, SAVE! I sound like a bloody rugs-a-million commercial but I'm trying to be dead serious. Save your game after every major item collected, after every boss you conquer and after every milestone conversation because you are bound to run into a bug in the game that will screw you over twice before you can say 'Stop touching me there Daddy'.

I can count six times where a bug has caused me to power down the console and to start it back up again. Once was when I had to quickly head off to something.. I don't know it was over 3 months ago give me a break. Anyway, I saved my game in a room and powered off. Once I returned and booted the game I found my character stuck in the room. The door had simply refused my entry. I had to load an auto save file which was saved roughly 2 hours of gameplay before. Another instance was that I fell through the bloody ground and another was when an enemy had floated up through the ceiling and would not fall back down for me to finish him off.

OMG! This computer has Pacman, I love that shit!

To put all this in plain Engrish, the game played and felt very unpolished. This was a huge disappointment for me, especially after reading the fantastic book (Mass Effect: Revelation) which is the prequel to the game and a must read for all you Mass Effect freaks.

Ok, that's enough negative Nancy for one review, I'll try to focus on the things that make Mass Effect worth talking about in a public area (AKA: outside of your home). I mentioned before that the character animations and voice acting are superb, and by that I mean the best I've seen for 2007. The characters themselves are worth taking note of and just the idea of all the races, history of the era, and the technology would have taken months to do.

Some missions are hit and miss but others will blow you out of the water. Yes you are able to fly to different planets and stars located within a lot of galaxies and nebulas but you are only allowed to land on one or two within the system which was another kick in the balls for me. Once you finally find a planet that you can land on you'll be given an all-terrain vehicle to drive around in, which is a mix between a Lylat Tank and an APC simply known as the Mako. The Mako is over-powered, you'll be able to take enemies out miles away and pretty much drive up vertical cliffs.

I'll admit I wasn't one of those freaks who play the game twice through so I wouldn't know much about the classes but I do happen to know something about the Vanguards. Vanguards mix light weapons and biotic powers. Most classes who have biotic powers can basically lift, move or stun any enemy with some pretty purple Mist Effect (oh I'm naughty).

CONTAINS HARDCORE DIGITAL ALIEN RAPE PORN

The current time is 7:00pm, you're almost 2 hours away from finishing the game and your most likely watching the sex scene with Ashley, or the blue chick.. or even the dude (whatever floats your boat). And once you've read that last sentence you'll now notice that the sex scene is over. Yep, that was it. Where was that damn nipple I was promised? All I saw was some making out, someone's ass and BAM! Sex scene over.

Now I'm not saying I was expecting some hot hentai tentacle school girl rape scene (I wonder how many Google hits we'll get for saying that), but I did want to see what the whole sex scene with Mass Effect was all about. It turns out that the idiots at Fox News should actually give the game a go and experience their so called FULL NUDITY DIGITAL PORN VIDEO GAME.

To quickly summarise Mass Effect I would like to admit that the positives overweigh the negatives. Yeah there are a lot of bugs and a few things could have been a lot more polished but the storyline and the character involvement has been completed to perfection. You will feel like you are playing a major role in a film, a well produced action sci-fi film.

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Final Verdict

Anyone who enjoys RPGs, BioWare's previous titles or games based in space will definitely get a kick out of this game. There are a few moments in Mass Effect that will help satisfy your gaming needs but unfortunately I think Mass Effect was a perfect opportunity for a space RPG game gone wasted. There are so many cool things that you could have done but you are restricted to very limited actions. I guess you have to be restricted within some boundaries but only time will tell� especially when there are two more Mass Effect titles coming our way.

Pros
Seth Green voice acting Joker, the Script is fantastic, Visuals are not amazing but the art is worth appreciating, believable characters, beautiful cut scenes, playing as a renegade is awesome.
Cons
Lousy sex scene, life span of game is much shorter than expected, I didn�t appreciate the game throwing me into the deep end by skipping the tutorials, saving constantly because of your fear of losing your progress, way too many weapon upgrades, would it kill to make the Shepard jump?