Mass Effect (PC, 2007)
This smash hit 3rd person sci-fi action RPG is a must play.
Nostalgia Factor: None.
Difficulty: Easy.
It certainly took me long enough to get around to Mass Effect, but alas, I have installed Mass Effect Legendary Edition, and I have completed the first game in the series. So many of my friends have been urging me to play Mass Effect for years. “Oh, you like sci-fi RPGs? You liked Knights of the Old Republic? You need to play Mass Effect.” I thoroughly enjoyed playing through KOTOR and KOTOR 2 years ago, but it only recently clicked for me that BioWare is the genius developer behind KOTOR and the Mass Effect series. Casey Hudson served as Game Director for both, and it’s easy to see the similarities and overlap between the two.
My first impression of Mass Effect, only a few hours in, was very positive. I was very impressed with the Legendary Edition’s updated visuals, I was immediately intrigued by the characters, and I was eating up every bit of dialogue. When I arrived at the Citadel, my codex exploded with lore drops, so I spent a full hour just devouring the incredible lore in this game. If you’ve been following my gaming journey, you know that I love good lore. There’s so much well written lore in this game, I became a bit overwhelmed. Drew Karpyshyn and his writing team have gone above and beyond with this series. Drew was also the writing lead for KOTOR, and you can certainly see similarities in the writing style.
Drew and company wrote 400,000 words and more than 20,000 lines of spoken dialogue for Mass Effect. This is a massive undertaking in 2007. Mass Effect was one of the forerunners in featuring this level of depth in game development — even though it’s pretty much just become the norm for AAA games these days. To quote IGN’s Justin Davis, “Games are just impossible to make now.” The standards of game development have just been raised so high this past decade. It took a team of 120 developers four years to make Mass Effect for the Xbox 360. Today, it takes five, six, or even seven years or more for a large team to make a AAA game. Rockstar has been working on GTA6 for 10 years. This is a legitimate problem that the video game industry is struggling to navigate. Games have just become so huge, so detailed, with so many branching paths and characters and dialogue trees, the investment and the risk of making games like this is becoming untenable. The standards of game development just continue to be raised, and Mass Effect was one of the early games that started this arms race.
The well-crafted story is easily the greatest strength of Mass Effect. If you love a good story, if you want to get lost in a well-crafted sci-fi world with interesting planets, races, and characters — Mass Effect is right up your alley. The voice acting is top notch. The cutscenes are very well done. I really have very few complaints about the writing and the story.
Perhaps my only complaint in this area is that the romance component feels forced. It’s not clear which lines of dialogue are intended to be flirtatious. I was just trying to show basic kindness to all of my crew, but I somehow ended up in an awkward love triangle confrontation in the middle of the game, forced to choose between two characters that seemed to think I was making advances toward them. I have no idea how I arrived at that point, and it all felt shockingly sudden. I was confused and disappointed by that abrupt disruption to the game’s otherwise excellent immersion, so I just finished the rest of the game in full bachelor mode. Apparently, the romance component is more developed in Mass Effect 2.
The writing and story alone is enough for me to give this game a strong 8 out of 10, in spite of some notable flaws in the gameplay. The 3rd person shooting gameplay is serviceable, if not a bit dull and repetitive at times compared to more polished shooters. I found the cover mechanic to be clunky and a little frustrating. Each battle environment is also constructed a little too obviously with objects to take cover behind. This is another ding in the game’s immersion, as these objects just feel like props littered across each area. This makes some areas of the game feel more like a paintball arena than an alien world. That being said, there are also some portions of the game that are very well designed. There were several times throughout my 55+ hour playthrough that I had to pause and just take a minute to take in a gorgeous environment. There are many many moments like this — pure galactic planetary wanderlust.
Mass Effect provides you with unlimited ammo for each of your weapons. This is mitigated by each gun’s heatsink capacity, which can be overloaded if you fire continuously. This was interesting at first, but I eventually grew tired of not being able to go full-guns-a-blazing when needed in the heat of battle. Managing ammo instead of heatsink capacity is a much more interesting game design in my opinion. Kudos to BioWare for trying something different here, but it does seem they reverted back to a standard ammo system in Mass Effect 2.
The inventory in Mass Effect is not a strength. I quickly became overwhelmed with multiple duplicate copies of various weapons. There’s a huge variety of different weapon names and levels, but there are only four different weapon types — pistols, assault rifles, shotguns, and sniper rifles. All of the various named weapons only change the stats for that weapon type. There’s barely any difference among the majority of the assault rifles in terms of gunplay and feel. Sorting through all of these weapons and equipping the highest level items on seven different crew members quickly became a tedious chore. Please, my kingdom for an optimize-all button. Selling items is also not very streamlined. Towards the end of the game, many players will hit max credits from selling all of the loot, so any loot you gain after that point feels meaningless. I ended up converting most of my excess loot to omni-gel, which is a resource I don’t think I used even once in my entire playthrough.
Initially, I really liked the Mako sections of the game. Quite often, you’ll be plopped onto the surface of a planet in your M35 Mako Infantry Fighting Vehicle. It’s a little tank thing with six wheels and propulsion jets. It’s slightly more wonky to control than the Warthog from Halo, but I find this to be more endearing than problematic. It’s fun using the jets to hover a bit or to blast forward. The coaxially-mounted machine gun and 155mm mass accelerator cannon are definitely a highlight of the Mako gameplay. It’s an absolute thrill blasting Geth soldiers with the cannon and watching them flail about like ragdolls after being launched from the explosion.
Unfortunately, there’s just not enough variety of terrain in the Mako sections to keep it interesting. There are loads of side quests on loads of planets that all start to feel very “samey”. The gameplay loop is much too similar for many of these side quests. There’s just too much repetition — land on a planet, enter the outpost, shoot the bad guys, return to the Normandy, rinse and repeat. Aside from the Citadel and the six core worlds, there are 28 additional planets you can explore. Yes, 28 planets. Unfortunately, these planets all have similar surfaces. There are only four or five different varieties.
If you commit to all of the side quests like me, you’ll get that sense of déjà vu quite a bit. I’d say about 90% of the enemy outposts on these planets share the exact same layout, give or take some crates on the inside that are arranged in a different pattern. It’s almost like there’s some space corporation with a monopoly on planet exploration manufactured buildings. That’s why each research facility or enemy outpost shares the exact same copy-paste shape and layout. Honestly, if they wrote that into the lore, it probably wouldn’t bother me so much. I think 28 explorable planets is just way too ambitious. The quality of the side content is significantly weaker than on the core worlds. I think I prefer quality over quantity with most things in life. That being said, it’s clear that BioWare focused their efforts on the core game worlds, which are much more developed and thus much more interesting to explore. I thoroughly enjoyed my time on the core worlds, especially the gorgeous stormy-tropical Virmire and the mysterious Ilos.
There are additional planets that you can’t explore with the Mako, and some poor bloke had to try to come up with interesting text descriptions for over 200 total planets. I’m a massive lore nerd, and even I became fatigued after reading a dozen or so of these planet descriptions. It does make this game world feel that much larger. Though, I do wish they would’ve adjusted the physics of the Mako to match the gravity level for each of the explorable planets. Each planet’s gravity feels exactly the same, in spite of the vastly different gravity levels in the planet descriptions. Am I being too picky? This is a game originally released in 2007 after all.
On foot, many environments are somewhat linear, and there’s not much to look for in terms of loot. You don’t loot the bodies of fallen enemies, and you don’t search half a dozen empty containers in every room like in Bethesda RPGs, but there are at least a handful of crates scattered throughout each area of the game. I do like that the loot crates are highlighted by a cursor as you approach, which helps them to stand out from the decorative assets that can’t be interacted with. Instead of lockpicking, some crates must be bypassed. I quite enjoyed the bypass mini-game. It’s a bit like a circular version of Frogger or Crossy Road. You have to advance an arrow through each outer ring, dodging the moving obstacles, until you reach the center. It’s fun at first, but it does lose its luster after 50 hours of gameplay.
One last complaint about the gameplay — Shepard’s movement speed is super slow. I have this same complaint with so many games from the 90s and 2000s. Why did game developers insist on such slow player movement? Thankfully, if you enable the console, you can use the ‘SetSpeed 5’ command to speed up Shepard’s movespeed. Unfortunately, you have to punch this command in each time you load into a new area.
I did encounter some bugs. I got stuck in walls and behind objects a few times. I had to use the no clip console command, “ghost”, to get unstuck. The command, “walk,” disables no clip mode. Only once, when I exited the inventory menu, Shepard got stuck in a hilarious pose. My companions would occasionally jitter around with janky movements, but thankfully, none of these bugs were critical or game-breaking.
The Legendary Edition release improved 3D models and texture resolution. They added real-time reflections, they fixed some bugs, and they added a photo mode, among many other changes. But, some fans of the original trilogy were not thrilled with the changes made to the game’s lighting. The original games featured very high contrast lighting. This “chiaroscuro” lighting style is moody and intense, but you do sacrifice some detail when heavy shadows swallow up half the screen. The Legendary Edition flattens much of that extreme contrast, allowing more detail to be seen, but at the cost of the original style and intensity. The colors are definitely more rich and vibrant, but I can understand the complaints about the game feeling less cinematic. It looks a bit more like a well-lit television studio set, like you’re on an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
The Legendary Edition also reduced some difficulty on a few tricky missions. I still encountered a few difficulty spikes in the early game, but on the whole, it did feel like the game’s normal difficulty mode was on the easy side. Most of the game was a breeze. Feedback on the changes in Legendary Edition remains mixed. I can understand both sides of the debate. There are some scenes in the original games that were much too dark, but they may have overcompensated by reducing contrast too much. In general, gamers don’t really do well with any kind of change when it comes to their favorite games, so the debate continues.
The soundtrack by Jack Wall is another strength of the game. Most of the tracks are a perfect blend of nostalgic sci-fi synths and modern orchestral sounds, but there are a few tracks that feel a bit underdeveloped. It was reported that additional composers had to be brought in to help finish the score towards the end of the project. There are a few tracks that sound a little cheesy, a little dated, like something you’d hear at Cosmic Ray’s Starlight Cafe in Disney’s World’s Tomorrowland. Shout out to any Disney World fans.
Ultimately, in spite of a few notable flaws, Mass Effect still earns a strong score because it features some of the best writing I’ve seen in a video game in a long time. Sci-fi concepts like “mass effect physics” and “element zero” are obvious plot devices, of course. It’s science fiction. There’s always some suspension of disbelief required to engage with the content. But, the best science fiction writers are able to articulate these concepts in a way that seems plausible, at least to someone without a PhD in theoretical physics. In the very least, if you wrap a bizarre sci-fi concept in enough clever jargon, as the Mass Effect writers have, it makes it a little easier to maintain that suspension of disbelief. That’s why I’ve continued to devour every little bit of Mass Effect lore in the codex. It’s just so well written. I highly recommend Mass Effect for any sci-fi RPG nerds like me.
Now you gotta check out Exodus (also Drew Karpyshyn)! Just started his Darth Bane book series. Really love his writing.