I completed Mass Effect 3 a few days after launch, and was soon a frequent visitor to the Mass Effect 3 forums on the Bioware Social Network. As disappointed in the ending as I personally was, I also soon learned that my experience of Mass Effect 3 was ultimately incomplete. I had still never played the original Mass Effect. My Playstation 3 copy of Mass Effect 2 introduced me to some of the original game’s content, and indeed, allowed me to make some of that game’s key decisions, even if I had to make those decisions in what amounted to a vacuum of no narrative context. But this vacuum colored my perceptions. A character I assumed was expendable turned out to be one of the series’ most beloved. Other favorites I had never met because a fifteen minute “interactive comic” couldn’t dream of covering them all.
But all was not lost. During the early weeks of the backlash against Mass Effect 3, Amazon offered a deal: downloadable versions of Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 for the low bundle price of $11.99. With several hundred dollars of life support funneled into my aging desktop, the old girl seemed ready. Still hopeful that Bioware’s recent missteps could become learning experiences and not prophecies of impending doom, I couldn’t pass up the chance to experience Mass Effect from the ground up as Bioware no doubt intended. I’ve now completed the first stage of my re-entry into the Mass Effect universe, and it’s certainly been thought provoking so far.
The above preamble seeks that this review is around five years too late to be relevant in the traditional sense. But Mass Effect, as you might expect, serves as a wonderful place to begin for any examination of the series as a whole, and turning a critical eye to Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 can aid in understanding the level of fan investment necessary to allow the perhaps unprecedented nature of the backlash against Mass Effect 3. Beyond that, starting at the beginning is the only way to truly appreciate the ways in which Bioware strengthened as a developer as the series progressed, but also those areas in which they fumbled.
Since this review is a retrospective, I’m not going to spend any time providing a synopsis of the story or setting the stage for someone new to the game. Five years after the game’s release, I imagine Mass Effect has become familiar enough to gamers by and large that I don’t need to tell you much about how awesome Commander Shepard is. I will offer one small disclaimer: I have nearly always played the Mass Effect games with a female Commander Shepard and so may occasionally use feminine pronouns when referring to the series protagonist (when I use them at all). This habit of mine isn’t meant to suggest that female Shepard is better than a male Shepard (except, of course, for the fact that “FemShep” rocks “BroShep” every day of the week, and twice on Sunday). Those things having been said, we can move on to the nuts and bolts of this review: my thoughts on Mass Effect’s gameplay, systems, and narrative.
GAMEPLAY
Mass Effect’s gameplay can safely be divided into three parts: combat, commuting, and conversation (alliteration intentional because I wanted a reason to write “alliteration.”). The last of these has a huge part to play in the game’s narrative delivery, and so I’ll discuss it in more detail below. The former two represent something of a departure from Bioware’s more traditional combat and navigation systems, and their first humble steps off the edge of the map did indeed introduce them to a monster or two.
Combat in Mass Effect is hardly revolutionary, and indeed, it probably shouldn’t be, since the game was attempting to marry two generally separate types of gameplay: third-person action shooting with traditional “role-playing,” (which for decades have had tedious menu-based combat or occasionally “point-and-click” varieties of the same). Bioware made a conscious decision to stick to a relatively simple combat system, presumably intending that the real meat of the game was in its narrative strength. Given their inexperience with involved, action-oriented combat systems, this may have been a choice made out of necessity, but it was probably a wise one.
What little Mass Effect’s combat attempts to do, it does poorly. Hit detection is somewhat awkward: you may occasionally think you’ve missed an enemy only to see him drop dead or hit him square in the eyes only to find his health bar unshaken. Enemies can sometimes see and hit you perfectly before you’re able to detect them (most especially in the game’s vehicle combat). On top of this, the game’s controls are designed in such a way as to add another enemy to your fire fight. The act of taking cover is tied to movement keys and it is often difficult to determine whether a given movement will cause Commander Shepard to shift along the wall, or jump of cover into enemy fire as if she had a death wish. The Commander’s death wish is most apparent when trying to peak around cover, as the game offers no visual cues to the player as to whether the Commander is actually doing so. You may occasionally nudge to one side or the other, thinking you’re not close enough to actually fire only to realize that you’re quite close enough to get fired at. The game’s difficulty is also fairly steep, requiring a careful and thoughtful approach to many firefights, even on lower difficulty levels. This would normally be welcome (especially as it’s something of the standard for Bioware games prior to Mass Effect—although perhaps less so for those after it), but the frustrating controls sometimes shift the focus of conquering a difficult battle from your tactical expertise to how well the controls decided to work for you at that moment.
Similar pitfalls plague the game’s “commuting” sections, in which you pilot a planetary surface rover that clearly took a page or two from the book of some of the early Mars rovers. Your vehicle—the Mako—handles like a refrigerator on wheels (I can’t for the life of me remember where I first heard that, but it’s applicable here) and also seems to regularly defy the laws of physics if you happen to hit a piece of terrain at the wrong angle. You also get the pleasure of using the Mako’s onboard weaponry in a combat system even less polished than that of the third-person shooting segments. The best way to complete one of the game’s vehicle sections involves a lot of quick-saving, as a poor performance in one vehicle firefight can leave you ill-equipped to handle the next, mainly because the vehicle’s shields regenerate incredibly slowly.
This is quite a shame, really, as exploring alien worlds (and even on at least one opportunity, a place not quite so alien: Earth’s moon) is something that’s easy to get lost in and does a lot to enhance the epic feel of the game’s narrative. Some of that appeal is lost, though, when you realize your last save prior to a failure was ten minutes ago and you have to replay the entire section, one frustrating and immersion-breaking firefight after another.
So far, I haven’t had a lot of nice things to say about Mass Effect. Truth be told, I won’t have many nice things to say for the next section, either. But I promise, I do have good things to say—we just have to get there first. Mass Effect was good enough that I feel compelled to end on a high note, and that means we have to tackle the next section before we can get to the game’s strongest traits.
SYSTEMS
Like its archaic-by-today’s-standards combat, the game’s systems, from character progression to inventory really show their age five years down the road. Character progression is in many ways standard: each time you gain enough experience to “go up a level,” you earn a few points to distribute amongst a number of different skills, ranging from general toughness and weapon expertise to hacking skills and how you want to develop your social graces. For Mass Effect, though, the system isn’t implemented with a lot of finesse. Each skill has ten or so levels, and each character has ten or so separate skills. At each level, you typically gain two points to spend on any of these skills. At face value, the system is designed in such a way as to make you decide which skills to develop at the cost of others. For a first-time player, however, it isn’t directly apparent how valuable each skill will be in the game at large, and furthermore, it can be somewhat easy to end up with characters that are too focused on the “non-combat” skills to allow them to feel successful at the game’s sometimes frustrating combat. While the leveling system isn’t non-functional, it may have benefited from separate “combat” and “non-combat” skill trees (like, say, another of Bioware’s titles, Dragon Age: Origins) to reduce the potential for player traps.
The advancement system works well enough, though. The same can’t be said for the game’s inventory system. As you explore the galaxy, you’ll undoubtedly find any number of guns and grenades and suits of armor and weapon upgrade parts and specialized types of ammunition and so on. Mass Effect borrows a lot from role-playing games that came before it in this regard, and expansive inventory systems can offer a lot of ways to customize your characters. But if they aren’t accompanied by a well-designed management system, their vastness can quickly overwhelm the player. Such is the case with Mass Effect. You accumulate so many items that you quickly have far more than you could ever reasonably have a use for, leaving you to either convert the extras into “omni-gel” (an all-purpose tool for hacking and other tasks) or to sell them. As a result, you’ll spend untold amounts of time selecting one item and then selecting “convert,” and doing it over and over and over and over. For some reason, there’s no ability to select all or convert large swaths of items at once (although there is an option to take every item in a container with a single choice). Don’t be coy and think you can just let the junk accumulate, either, as the game limits your inventory to 150 items, and you at least want to be able to get the upgrades out of all the junk. As a result, far too much of your playtime is spent getting rid of junk, which detracts greatly from the overall experience.
Where Mass Effect’s combat and travel display Bioware’s inexperience with action-oriented gameplay, the game’s advancement and inventory systems shine an uncomfortable light on their ill-advised adherence to archaic design of the role-playing genre (though they did attempt to move forward in both of these regards in the sequels). Despite these negative aspects of the game, it still demonstrates a lot of strength in what has always been one of Bioware’s greatest strengths as a developer: the portrayal of narrative.
NARRATIVE
I’m not going to bore you too much with the specific details of Mass Effect’s narrative. By now, it’s probably relatively common knowledge that Commander Shepard discovers and fights against the enigmatic and unimaginably powerful Reapers, sentient machines bent on wiping out all life in the galaxy. For most of Mass Effect, you don’t actually know that’s what you’re up to, though: the game’s purpose in the trilogy (and, indeed, Mass Effect was always imagined as a trilogy, at least in broad strokes) is to reveal the ultimate antagonist of the series. The core of the narrative is executed with the care that many have come to expect from Bioware. The plot follows a fairly standard arc, but it is well-crafted and is seated upon a rich, detailed universe that brims with all the passion of artists hard at work.
Mass Effect lays the groundwork for what would become defining elements of the series: well-written characters, a well-crafted (if somewhat standard) story, tasteful juxtaposition of dark and light elements in the story, and perhaps most importantly, the “dialogue wheel,” and the Paragon/Renegade “morality” system (though morality is honestly a bit of a misnomer here, as Paragon and Renegade choices are far more about attitude than they are about whether Commander Shepard is good or evil). All of these combine to create a narrative experience truly unlike any other in video game history. Even Bioware’s struggle at times to reach the bar set by Mass Effect (and the series as a whole). This begins and ends, ultimately, with the characters that breathe life into the world, both your squad mates and Commander Shepard herself.
Because the series was conceived of as a trilogy, the writers were given much more liberty to introduce characters with their future development in mind. Many of the characters seem naïve or shallow at first, but as the game progresses they grow, and begin to question previous assumptions or use Shepard’s example to justify a new path in life. As the series as a whole progresses, the characters grow in endearing, interesting, and wonderful ways that only retrospect can truly make clear. If you aren’t torn about which of Ashley or Kaiden to sacrifice during a mission on Virmire, don’t find the optimism of Tali’Zorah adorable, or enjoy watching Garrus come to realize he can’t stand to deal with the bureaucracy and red tape of “by the book” law enforcement, you may not have been talking to the characters enough. Seriously, talk to them. Bioware put far more effort into the characters and their dialogue and their stories than they seem to have with the game’s other aspects, and that may be just because they always intended the characters to be the focus over those other things.
That focus is most clear perhaps in the character of Commander Shepard herself. Through the dialogue wheel, you decide how you interact with these characters—whether you care about them or not, whether you’ll fall in love with them, or whether you’ll shoot them for disagreeing with you. Your decisions matter, and they give you a different experience, and indeed, a different main character, each time you play Mass Effect. The overall thrust of the story may remain the same, but the difference is in the details—quite literally so. All the while, you’re developing Commander Shepard, via the “attitude” system in the same way that the other character s change as the game goes on. That Bioware was able to competently weave a compelling narrative while at the same time giving the player the ability to invest in that narrative through personal choice and some degree of narrative control is a testament to the strength of team that wrote Mass Effect.
CONCLUSION
The game’s narrative strengths make it worth playing at least once for anyone looking to take the leap into Mass Effect’s grand universe. While the gameplay definitely shows its age, if you’re patient with it, you’ll find your future journeys in the world much richer for sticking through with the original game (as I’m finding right now while re-playing Mass Effect 2 on PC). After that initial playthrough, though, it might be worth it to pick up the Mass Effect: Genesis downloadable content for Mass Effect 2, which lets you make several of the first game’s key decisions without having to slog through its archaic gameplay.
Mass Effect is available for both PC and Xbox 360, generally for $20 or less.
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