Saturday, February 28, 2009

Mass Effect

When I first played Knights of the Old Republic (KOTR) I was enthralled. Here was a Star Wars game that was better than the latest Star Wars movies, full of engrossing characters, interesting plots, and aliens true to their roots from the Star Wars universe. At the time, one flaw popped up that really bothered my wife: talking to the aliens ad nauseum meant that certain sound bites were repeated by certain alien races over and over. So you had a lot of "ooka shishka jedi" stuff going on that, while it didn't bother me too much, certainly annoyed the heck out of anyone having to listen to it over and over as I talked to everything that was willing to carry on a conversation. Then I bought Jade Empire and to my horror, discovered that it was the exact same game engine. It's the same engine used for Mass Effect. And all that dialogue is starting to get old.

Allow me to deconstruct the myth that Mass Effect is a supreme role-playing game experience.
  • SCIENCE-FICTION ROLE-PLAYING: PERFECTED. The setting is a combination of Star Wars' exotic worlds, Star Trek's ship interiors, and Babylon 5's battle to establish human dominance in an alien world. Mass Effect uses conversational pathing. Generally speaking, the top choice is positive, the middle choice is neutral, and the bottom choice is negative. So if you want to be a jerk, you can always pick the rude bottom choice, and if you want to be a nice guy, you can always pick the positive top choice. Or if you're in a hurry, you click the button and move to the next chat menu. This is not role-playing, it's a game of multiple choice, and the majority of the time the choices are obvious. This game has more in common with KOTR than the game engine. The customizability of equipment and characters, the level up system, it's all the same. So instead of the Force we have "biotics." You can also customize your character's appearance, which is neat. However, Xbox's new interactive menus allow the same thing - avatar customization. It hardly makes this a "perfect" role-playing game. The equipment improvements come down to: Fire Ammo IV and Laser Rifle VII. There is a whole pile of scrolling text you can read about the history of the weapon, but the short of it is VII is better than VI which is better than V. You could get those kinds of power ups in a game of Diablo.
  • THE VASTNESS OF SPACE BECKONS. Like KOTR, you have a ship that you can fly all over the universe. This is like the world's worst sandbox - it's hard enough to figure out what to do and where to go in a small city. Yes, there's lots of content, but it's not necessarily relevant or interesting. Almost all the quests involve "go here, get widget, return it to me." Then there's the MAKO, a dune buggy-type roving cannon. Exploring the surface of worlds primarily involves shooting at giant crab things that you can run over. In this respect Mass Effect is reminiscent of the Final Fantasy games.
  • LOSE YOURSELF IN A LIVING GALAXY. The graphics are amazing, the voice acting top notch, the character expressions just as nuanced as promised. It has Seth Green as a voice actor, which rocks. But for reasons I will never understand, there are long elevator sequences. In the world of science fiction, where ships can travel through space and alien races intermingle, we have not yet invented a means around elevators. EVERY time you get in an elevator, your characters freeze, face forward, and you listen to the sci-fi equivalent of elevator Muzak. The only thing you can do is spin the camera around the characters while they stand there. You can't reload, check equipment, or anything else. It's useless downtime. For some reason, the highly advanced civilizations still like to keep their belongings in boxes. The boxes can be hacked; I'm a sucker for these mini-games, so I confess I enjoyed them. But really, boxes? There might be other interesting ways of finding equipment, but since this is the same game engine as KOTR, boxes are everywhere. There is also the romantic subplot. This subplot involves choosing between a sexy blue alien (reminiscent of Zhaan from Farscape) and a pushy human racist woman. It's pretty clear which woman the game would like you to hook up with (or man, if you play a female character, but the alien female retains her faux gender). This is hardly a deep romantic plot, and the ruckus raised over the intimate scene between the two characters is unwarranted; it's far tamer than anything on the Internet. To save on memory, the majority of aliens are the same bodies duplicated multiple times, in the same way Star Trek tended to have every alien be humanoid since that meant less makeup was required. There are a lot of the blue female aliens throughout the game, and they all look similar. There's not a fat person among them. Even the ship's doctor, a much older woman, is a silver fox with the body of a twenty year old (where was the romantic subplot with HER?).
  • LEAD YOUR SQUAD IN INTENSE, REAL-TIME COMBAT. Although your best bet in beating this game is as a soldier, Mass Effect is no Halo. The third person perspective is difficult to follow, especially when you fight many enemies at once. What this means is you're constantly pausing the game to give your squad commands, which completely ruins the "real-time" combat element. There isn't the nail-biting thrill of trying to reload a weapon perfectly like Gears of War, and the ability to use terrain as cover isn't nearly as smooth.
Mass Effect isn't a bad game by any means. The graphics are excellent and if you have the time, you can wander the world interrogating every single alien, reading and listening to every path of dialogue, and looting everything on every planet.

Mass Effect is ultimately a giant sandbox that's somewhat different from KOTR, only with none of the cachet of Star Wars. The main plot line, the one in which you save the universe, is a lot of fun and makes for an interesting game. But you'll have to sit through a lot of elevators to get there.

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