Mass Effect Review

9.0

Format Xbox 360

Developer Bioware

Publisher Microsoft

Genre Role Playing, Action

37 Comments

They say your first is always the one you remember the strongest. It's certainly true of the first planetary landing you make in Mass Effect. There may be greener, denser, more populated spheres, but your first landing is special. It's one of those moments. The kind of event that, ten or twenty years from now when the mainstream media are no longer scared of all the flashy lights and loud bangs, will be at the business end of those pitiful 'Top 100 Gaming Moments' list things that Channel 4 commission so very, very often. You can imagine how it would go.

"It was terrible," offers a burnt-out Jamie Theakson, looking around the darkened room with empty eyes. "I remember it like it was yesterday. We landed on this small mining planet. Looking for survivors, we were. But... I don't know what they were excavating down there... but it changed them. They were no more men than husks. We had to... kill them all. I was emotionally scarred by Mass Effect, and that's why I [Libellous content removed - Legal Ed] those [And again - Legal Ed] up the [Sigh - Legal Ed]. So when can we bring back Live & Kicking?"

First contact
Our first landing (and you'll forgive us for spoiling this one, as there's plenty more) was a very small, barren, meteor-prone sandstone planet named Edious, located in the Artemis Tau cluster. It was just a routine survey that piqued our interest; a weak distress signal that warranted a closer look. Landing near the signal's source in our all-wheel drive, we crawled over the rocky terrain toward our destination. The distress beacon, we discover, was a set-up. But for what? We don't get much information from the crew of a rescue ship that beat us to the location, because their crew is a bit on the dead side.

Suddenly, the ground rumbles beneath us and things become a bit clearer; a gigantic astroworm funnels out of the ground, spitting out acidic phlegm left right and centre. We dash for the hills in a blind panic, but the worm telegraphs our cowardice and bursts up from underneath, sending us arcing through the air. We escape with our lives; and when you find time to contemplate things during the warmdown, that's when you realise that this isn't just Jade Empire with space marines.

The events as detailed aren't an integral part of the storyline. On the contrary, in fact: miss a conversation here or there, or just let the assignment thread get lost amid a blizzard of other trivial assignments, and it becomes increasingly unlikely that you'll ever set foot on Edious. If you want to just play Mass Effect's main storyline, it probably won't take you that long. But the basic human thirst for exploration, coupled with the size of Mass Effect's universe, dictates that you won't want to do that. You'll want to go from A to B via C, D, E F and G - and by the time you get back on track, you might find that B is an entirely different proposition than it was before.

Lend us your linears
BioWare claim that Mass Effect is the least linear RPG that they've ever assembled, and they're not wrong; aside from all the side-quests, even the main storyline can pan out differently depending on your demeanour. Those who have experienced past BioWare games such as Knights Of The Old Republic will know that they're big on allowing your decisions and interaction to dictate how the NPCs react to you. Mass Effect copies that game's Light/Dark Side mechanic by grafting you the equivalent Paragon/Renegade points every time you make a 'good' or 'bad' decision. But in practice Mass Effect offers so much more than this.

As Captain INSERTNAMEHERE Shepherd, a battle-scarred war hero/heroine, every decision you make will have severe repercussions. You are (or rather, you become) the first human Spectre - an elite intergalactic soldier essentially above the law. Your one remit is to maintain galactic peace whatever the cost. But as with all celebrities, what you say is often as important as what you do. You'll come across a nosy reporter who thinks you're just a shill for the council; lamp her one, and public opinion back on Earth may not be so great. You'll have to keep on the right side of your squad members - during the opening mission on Eden Prime, we were very curt when addressing a young soldier named Ashley Williams, and were surprised to discover that we needed to spend time smoothing things out with her later on.

Later on, you'll need to play diplomat, as distrust grows between human members and alien members, and if your ideology strays too far from theirs, you may find squad members upping sticks entirely. It doesn't help matters that the Council doesn't exactly have your back; humans are a poorly-regarded species within the Alliance, and you'll not be short of people who would like to set you up for a fall. What you say seems to have a very real impact, with chastised team-mates looking at you with big round 'who, me?' eyes. The dialogue trees are excellent. Not once will you find yourself just selecting whatever to progress the storyline. You wouldn't want them to think you were a bastard.

Morality is a complex issue here; you won't sprout crap devil horns like in Fable, but you'll generally find that you get treated as your actions deserve. It's set up for multiple playthroughs (a fact confirmed by some of the game's Achievements) but as engrossing as Mass Effect is, there is a gameplay barrier that, while not enough to ruin the game, might cause you to develop flu-like symptoms if you ever even contemplate playing through it all again: the combat system.

Mortal combat
When you're not sitting around gassing with aliens and changing the very course of the universe with your conversational threads, you're starring in a squad-based third-person shooter. And, it must be said, quite an unrefined one. The concept is that this is to shooters as Jade Empire was to action-adventure games, replacing turn-based combat with real-time action, eliminating the age-old RPG malady of the level grind. Certainly it pulls off the RPG integration with a great degree of finesse. Tapping the right bumper pauses play and brings up the weapons menu for you and your squad, while the left bumper brings up what may as well be the 'spells menu'. What's available to you and your squad is dependant on what areas you've concentrated your experience points on (you can ask the game to allocate them automatically, but we'd recommend doing it yourself, if only to get a decent understanding of how everything works).

The skills are essentially age-old RPG conventions with a sci-fi twist; you can defuse barriers or set up your own; perform a weak neural shock to all nearby organic enemies, or provide temporary boosts in armour or firearm skill. Dependant on your class type or the squad members accompanying you, you can even learn and unleash more far out attacks, such as a 'throw' attack that reminds us distinctly of the Force in KOTOR. But don't waste all your XP on offence; decryption and electronic skills are also important, particularly if you're looking to maximise your understanding of the Mass Effect universe.

Bad cover version
Combat is slow-paced and ruthless. And you really are in command, here - if you lose the plot for a second, nine times out of ten, the situation becomes unsalvageable and your entire team's history. If you've dived in clean from Halo 3, they'll be scraping you off the Eden Prime tarmac multiple times before you get to grips with it. These sections are a strange mix between Ghost Recon, Gears of War and (promise us you won't run away) Perfect Dark Zero, and generally they work really well when sparring against the more intelligent races, where cover and tactical positioning is of the utmost importance. Team-mate AI and pathfinding is generally of a high quality, although they're often prone to hogging the premium cover positions, and you get the odd bout of hilarity where your specially-trained warrior gets flummoxed by a simple door.

The problems that do arise are largely a result of poor design decisions. The more stupid enemies, such as the Husks (a fairly common foe), simply charge at you, not showing off the rudimentary shooting in the best light. Since bullets aren't a worry, with only an overheat meter to keep tabs on, you can defeat large swathes of these by backing off and holding fire, which is about as exciting as helping Alan Shearer strip the wallpaper from his spare bedroom.

But some truly duff level designs in places accentuate this problem. There are more than a few occasions where success is a matter of trial and error - seeking out the 'correct' place to hide and picking the opposition off one by one. And we can't skip onto the next point without mentioning the dreadful section that occurs in the underground tunnels of Feros - wave upon wave of freaks running towards you down a thin, dark corridor? Followed by the exact same attack wave in an identical corridor immediately afterwards? And then another two times after that? Imagine trying to tackle a Flood invasion with Ghost Recon's handling, and you're halfway there. It's misguided level design at best, and occurrences like this turn up far too often to simply dismiss them as a High Charity-esque anomaly.

There's slowdown as well. It's understandable with all that RPG gubbins underneath the bonnet, but where it wasn't so important during the likes of KOTOR, here you're trying to keep a steady aim. It's by no means game-breaking, or even that regular, but it will annoy you before you're through with it. Admittedly, we've been a bit down on the shooting sections, but the truth is that they're perfectly fine if you take the time to approach it as Bioware want you to. Far more immediate are the vehicle sections, which essentially play more like an upfront, dumb shooter and have obviously been placed there to offer a bit of stress relief.

Good to talk
All that said, it's hard not to be hugely impressed, though; the definition of the characters; the way relationships either flourish or are stretching to breaking point; the subtlety in which professional relationships can blossom into romantic interest (so subtle, many players won't even know it's possible). No matter who was in our squad, and no matter how inappropriate or contrary our responses, the reams of dialogue trickled smoothly and flawlessly.

Mass Effect's only problem is, paradoxically, what makes it so great: ambition. After the initial wow factor of being able to explore an entire galaxy, you'll soon get disgruntled with the hand-holding nature of the exploration, with all a planet's goods helpfully mapped out for you, negating the need to poke around a planet on your own. Veer too far from the beaten track and your pilot Joker (Seth Green to you and us) will plonk you back on track like in some kind of racing game from 2002. Elsewhere? The shooting, we've covered. And the plot - as good as it is, it is a bit insular and nerdy. We praise Bioware for their vision and ambition, but as Sideshow Bob once sagely noted, you don't win awards for attempted chemistry.

But the ultimate yardstick of an RPG is how believable its world is and how fluidly the story flows despite the number-crunching that powers it, and it's this that makes Mass Effect so special. Never before has storytelling been so competently ingrained into a videogame, and never before has a player had so much freedom to dictate the course of a linear storyline. Mass Effect isn't the laser-spewing monolith of a game we expected it to be, but it is far, far, far from a disappointment. Until now, RPGs have thought local; Mass Effect thinks global.

Alex Dale