Mass Effect

I've been playing Mass Effect on the 360 the past couple days. For me, video games are usually really awesome or really terrible. This is one of the few cases where I'm somewhere in the middle. It's made by Bioshock, the company who made Knights of the Old Republic a few years ago, but I don't really know what to think of the new game. It's like they changed some of the good things and kept some of the bad stuff.

Many of the problems deal with the functionality of the game. For instance, in some menus you can't just press B to get out of it; you have to make a selection. Also, equipping items and selling items is a bit of a pain. Let's say you want to buy a new suit of armor from a merchant and then sell the old one you were wearing. To do that, you have to first go to the merchant and buy the new suit. Then, you have to leave the merchant in order to go to your equipment screen, where you will equip the new suit. Then, you have to approach the merchant AGAIN and listen to his stupid speel about sampling his wares. Then you can sell your suit to him. It's all rather complicated. Rather than that, you should have to option of equipping the new suit and selling the old one as you're talking to the merchant.

The AI is absolutely some of the worst AI I've seen. And I'm talking about your teammates, the people you rely on to take out enemies and heal you. They CONSTANTLY stand in your way and run into rooms full of enemies.

In fact, the combat in general is horrible. Why are there separate buttons for unholstering and holstering your weapon??? The framerate drops constantly, even when enemies aren't on the screen, which makes playing the entire game difficult. You can sprint/ran, but only when you're in the middle of the battle. What if you're running through some huge building? Too bad.

The graphics, though quite good, have their flaws as well. The character shadows are kind of screwy, so as you're talking to people their shadows around their neck region are all jagged and deformed. Also, when a characters faces show emotion, sometimes the different pieces to their face (cheeks, lips, mouth, throat, etc.) "come apart" and you can see inside their heads. The bad animations and low framerate make it hard to focus on the storyline of the game.

The storyline is the absolute only reason I want to keep playing the game. It's a great scifi story with pretty good dialogue and voice acting. The game takes something like 40-50 hours to beat if you're thorough, which I am.

So, I dunno...do I want to keep playing? Yes, but only to see the story develop. If I get frustrated with the fighting much more, though, I might change my mind.

Overall Score: 6 out of 10 (Based on the storyline alone, I'd give it a 9 out of 10, though)