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Final Analysis: Mass Effect

What I thought of Mass Effect: A decidedly mixed experience
Would I play Mass Effect again? Twice was enough.
Did it deserve to lose in Round 3 (and 2?) Earlier, if anything.

Mass Effect is not that old. Try going back and playing Super Mario Galaxy, which came out the same year. Apart from readjusting to the motion controls, you'll probably find it to be a tightly designed, deeply payable, even good-looking game. If it came out today, it would still earn review scores of mostly 9 and above.

The same definitely cannot be said of the first Mass Effect. This game is janky, stiff, and frequently annoying. In many ways, a game like Halo: Combat Evolved, which came out six years earlier, was much more advanced.

As a shooter, Mass Effect is repetitive and unengaging. Even on a tuned-up difficulty setting, the enemies largely stand still and slowly fire, allowing the player to line up easy shots in quick succession. With a pistol, it was usually sufficient to stand still, hold down the fire button, and duck into cover when my gun started overheating. With the sniper rifle, what changed was that I pressed the button only once. As the game progressed, the majority of enemies became so nonthreatening that I could stand still and tank their shots without risking death. What challenge there was mostly came from instant-kill rockets and the occasional charging Krogan, and with the long load times, lackluster autosave system, and repetitive combat dying once in ME was more frustrating than a hundred deaths in VVVVVV.

The vehicle sections in the mako are so commonly complained-about that Bioware had a character joke about it in the second game. As poorly designed as the tank's core mechanics are, an even deeper problem is that there's nothing interesting to actually do in the Mako. Mass Effect's sidequests feel like they were made by a poorly-programmed level generator for a one-man indie game. They mostly consist of rolling around endless empty terrain doing completely inane tasks, usually a crappy version of Simon that doesn't even test memory skills. Truth be told, even just pressing a button and having Shepard do whatever hacking or scavenging task was at hand would be preferable to this!

Equally as uninspiring are the rewards for these quests. Mass Effect has my least favorite type of inventory management in an RPG, where all equipment is found randomly, the vast majority of it is worthless, and as much time is spent exchanging it for materials or money as using it. This kind of system does not add more depth of choice to equipping your squad. It merely adds more tedium as you're forced to sort through each new load of worthless guns in case you miss the rare good ones. There was a point when I just gave up, decided my equipment was good enough, and never bothered picking up new items until the game ended. My pistol at the time was called Raikou, and for the rest of the playthrough served as a grim reminded of an obligation ahead of me in this project.

As an RPG, it's one of the more shallow games I've played, with non-combat solutions to problems being rare, a dialog system that makes you guess how Shepard will interpret your choices (and most choices being controlled by the Paragon/Renegade meters anyway,) and a level-up system that feels unimpactful most of the time. In what I fear will become a recurring theme of this decade-long retrospective, the much-touted story choices don't amount to much difference either.

I found a lot to complain about in the first Mass Effect, and going over it all like that, ripping the game half to shreds, was definitely a cathartic feeling. But here's the point where I start feeling a little bad and patch it back up: Mass Effect might have the most interesting universe and lore of any game I've ever played. Its various species and factions have long histories and complex politics. Reading about conflicts like the Skyllian Blitz or the Krogan Rebellions made me wish I were playing a game set in those stories instead - or at least that one existed. Likewise, the characters and dialog were largely dynamic and compelling enough that my favorite part of the game was wandering around the Normandy and talking to the crew.

Mass Effect has the distinction of being the game of this project that I played the longest in a single session. I spent a Sunday night and much of a Monday morning playing almost half the game at once, and that's definitely a testament to how it does some things right. For all the tedium and drudgery of the gameplay, I never felt tempted to give up. The depth of the worldbuilding and characterization was enough to keep me pushing on.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect 2