Mass Effect for the PC is a beautiful, beautiful game.
It’s amazing what a 12GB data install will do to almost completely eradicate texture pop-in issues. Throw in a nice video card, and Mass Effect becomes a visual treasure, with stunning graphics and a solid framerate.
But while the PC version of Mass Effect makes for great eye candy, the actual game is still a less than stellar experience that is lacking in a few areas. While the texture pop-in problems that plagued the Xbox 360 experienced have been mostly eliminated, the other issues in the game are still there. It doesn’t live up to its own potential and barely meets the bar that the game sets for itself. Ultimately, Mass Effect’s PC release feels just as incomplete as the Xbox 360 version.
We’re hitting the jump in 5… 4… 3… 2… 1…
The story of Mass Effect starts off at full throttle, with a routine retrieval mission derailed by the invasion of a genocidal robotic group named the Geth. They’re hell-bent on stealing a Prothean artifact you’ve been sent to pick up, and are willing to slaughter the entire population of the planet in order to do it. The situation gets even more complicated by the appearance of Saren. Saren’s a Spectre, an elite warrior that exists above the law, tasked with defending galactic peace. It seems like Saren’s defected, and he’s controlling the Geth as part of his plan to destroy all biological life in the galaxy. Well, at least the boy starts small.
You’ll be taking on the role of Commander Shepard, an Alliance military member. The best of the best of the best (sir), Shepard is being evaluated for membership into the Spectre program as the first human member, and finds him/herself thrust into the middle of a plot that involves galactic intrigue, genocide, mysterious alien forces, and a long dead alien race that may have left behind clues to saving the galaxy. Joined by six additional characters, you’ll have to save the galaxy, stop the Geth, and learn the secrets of the Protheans by the time the cliffhanger ending comes up and the credits start to roll.
Commander Shepard is meant to be a customizable character, with both male and female options available. While the game offers you a pre-built template for each gender, you’re able to manipulate their facial appearance down to the small details in a manner similar to Oblivion, and you could easily spend hours tweaking the smallest details of your facial structure. It’s a pretty neat little system that starts you off well, doing its best to get you invested in a character you’ll be spending a lot of time looking at. The game also offers a couple of minor variations in some of the quests depending upon if you’re playing a male or female, but they’re not enormously significant.
Mass Effect starts off really well. The first mission on Eden Prime is fun, it’s fast, and it’s meant to introduce you to the various elements of the game. And it does this particularly well. This is then followed by a 1 – 2 hour intermission in the game, one which is referred to as "The Citadel". The Citadel’s purpose is to give you a healthy dose of story to explain the Goings On of the galaxy, and lead into why you’re playing. Ironically, the story bogs down while it’s explaining itself, leading to an amazing first hour followed by two hours of sheer boredom while the game tells you why you should be excited.
Mass Effect is an RPG mixed with a more than generous helping of First Person Shooter combat, leading to a style of gameplay that feels like Knights of the Old Republic with some Call of Duty mixed in. The action tends to be fast and furious, although the difficulty level could stand a little more balancing. You’ll only encounter a small handful of ‘boss’ type characters in the game, and even then, they’re not particularly difficult.
The shooter elements of the game could have been implemented a lot better. The game tries to give you a cover system similar to the one found in Gears of War, but the difference in effectiveness is like night and day. Mass Effect also offers up squad based commands, which are designed to let you quickly and accurately control your partner NPC’s. At least, that’s how it works in theory. In practice, the companion characters in your party will often act in a mindless fashion, with simple obstacles like boxes and walls throwing them off their game.
If shooting isn’t your cup of tea, the game also offers Biotic and Tech components, various Force-like powers and electronic advancements that give you some pretty nifty powers. It’s absolutely awesome to get enemies into a group, use the Throw command to hurl them against the wall, and then pick them off while they’re still collecting their wits and standing back up. And Vortex… well, let’s just say that it’s worth playing the game a second time just to see that one power. The biotic and tech powers are implemented very well, so much so that it’s entirely worth it to play the game with a class that focuses on one of those two trees.
But although the shooter elements could have been better, the RPG elements are much more disappointing.
In an attempt to make the text-based dialog interactions with non-playable characters more compelling, Mass Effect introduces the Dialog Wheel, a circular icon with a series of choices to let you quickly decide how you want to interact with other beings in the galaxy. This is really just a fancier way of presenting the exact same text, but instead of having those choices in a single row, they’re in a circle. That’s it, that’s all. And with the conversational decisions for positive/negative always in the same place, it’s just too easy to skip through the dialog. In essence, the Dialog Wheel attempts to reinvent the wheel into… another wheel.
With Mass Effect, Bioware set out to get rid of the Black and White nature of your decisions. The line between Good and Evil isn’t a staunchly defined one, after all, and life itself exists in shades of grey. So instead, they try to offer you a new way of making choices via the Paragon/Renegade system. In this system, there are no ‘wrong’ choices. Paragon choices are getting jobs done the right way, in a morally beneficial fashion. Renegade choices just get the job done, at whatever the cost. And that cost is usually a violent one.
But rather than blurring the line between good and evil, the game outright obliterates it and essentially neuters itself. Because your choices no longer have a good/evil impact, it doesn’t really matter which one you choose. People still interact with you in the same way, for the most part. Your side quests never dramatically change as a result of your decisions, and the overall outlook of the game doesn’t really diverge at any point because you’ve chosen to be a Paragon or a Renegade. While a few side quests offer up different rewards depending on your choices, only a handful of that limited subset are of any consequence. The end result is a system where your choices don’t matter compared against the big picture, and that’s an absolute killer for a role playing game. In an RPG, your choices should matter, they should make a difference, and they should make you pause and really consider the outcome of your decisions. What you’re given instead is a Choose Your Own Adventure story where almost every decision leads to the same outcome.
On the positive side of things, Shepard and the party members are each customizable, with each new level giving you a few more talent points to improve your skills and unlock new abilities. The level of customization is impressive, with each of the game’s classes offering you separate talent branches to tinker with. Certain classes will have certain skills hidden from them, practically encouraging you to play the game a second time to try out a separate path.
Shepard is joined by up to six party members that will accompany him/her on a journey to save the galaxy. The characters come equipped with their own back story and nuances, meaning you’ll have to interact with them in order to learn who they are and what their true intentions are. Sounds great, except that you can only interact with them while aboard the Normandy, between missions. While you’re down on the surface of a planet, any attempt to interact with a party member is met with a brief one-line verbal response, and that’s it. A lot of players will end up skipping any kind of character interaction with their companions, simply because doing so takes some legwork. The rewards for character interaction are mostly unsatisfying too. Even the romance subplot, which takes no less than five specific interactions at key points in the course of the game, only nets you with a shot of a naked butt and some side boob.
It also doesn’t help that the storytelling aspect of the game itself is a bit underwhelming. Part of the problem is that the ‘main’ quest is brief, taking approximately 8 hours to work your way through and never really hitting a peak. The side quests add another 20 – 25 hours of gameplay time, but they’re mostly irrelevant matters that don’t really give you a look at the bigger picture of the galaxy as a whole. In essence, the side quests don’t flesh out the story, they serve as distractions. It also doesn’t help that every side quest takes place on a nondescript planet, one which probably looks the same as the last planet you were on, as well as the planet before that. Repeat, ad nauseum. By the time the game is done, you’ve only been given a piece of the overall story, with hints that the rest will be told in the forthcoming sequel. The end result is a bit unsatisfying, leaving you with quite a few unanswered questions.
The PC version of the game sports a few new upgrades over the Xbox 360 predecessor, most notably in the inventory management department. On the 360, trying to manage an inventory is a chore, with a clunky interface that makes it difficult to find things and navigate your way through it. The PC version features an improved inventory management layout, with a reorganization that is simple, but effective. That’s really the extent of the inventory management changes. It makes it so much easier to deal with equipment management. Finding items in your list and handling upgrades is almost a pleasure here. Although, we’re still cursing the 150 item capacity.
The graphics in the game are absolutely incredible, as we already mentioned. Aside from a few minor issues with shadows and jagged textures, the game looks nearly flawless on a high end rig, with the texture popup almost completely resolved. It’s still there, and slower systems will see longer popup times, but if you’re a PC user with some heavy firepower in the video card department, it’s a matter of a half-second before textures popup. That one change alone earns the PC version some major props.
The game also loads much quicker in the PC version than it does on the 360. Landing on a planet takes 2 – 3 seconds on our high end rig, and jumping the Normandy between systems takes about half the time as it does on the 360. But those interminably long elevator rides when you’re in the various cities of the galaxy (especially the elevator to the docking bay of the Citadel) still take just as long as they did on the 360.
Bioware has also completely redone the Decryption and Electronics minigames, forgoing the annoying Simon game and replacing it with a minigame similar to cracking a safe. You’ll move a cursor through a few rings of moving targets, with the ultimate goal of reaching the center. It’s a much more fun and enjoying game than the Simon equivalent, but by the end of the game, you’ll probably have had more than your fill of it, and just resort to using your vast, unused amounts of Omni-Gel to unlock everything.
The PC version of Mass Effect also includes its own dedicated version of achievements, almost identical to the ones on the Xbox 360. Just like on the Xbox 360, some of the achievements are mostly there for show, while unlocking others gives you certain stat bonuses, for both your current character and any future characters as well.
And unfortunately, driving the Mako still sucks.
Mass Effect isn’t as bad as you might think. But it’s also not the Home Run hit that Bioware games so often are. Mass Effect reaches for the stars and instead of actually making it there, it sort of sets up base camp at the halfway point and pats itself on the back for making it that far. The ideas that the game presents are awesome, but almost every concept in the game is under used, under played, or under developed. The Dialog Wheel is the guiltiest of these, a system that was previewed as defying the trends and one which ends up just being the same conversation system in a new package.
There’s fun to be had here, don’t get me wrong. But it’s not as fun as it could be, it’s not as fun as it should be, and in a lot of cases, it’s not even as fun as Bioware’s past games. Mass Effect tries to be everything at once, and ends up succeeding at nothing. Well, except for the visuals. Those sure are pretty.
The replay factor isn’t particularly high here, with a mostly-fixed ending that has a few subtle variations depending on a few of the choices you’ve made. Once you’ve played again, the only real highlights of a second playthrough are utilizing the stat bonuses from unlocked achievements, as well as trying out a separate class to play with some of the cool powers.
What hurts Mass Effect the most is that the overall game on the PC is still as inherently as flawed as the Xbox 360 version is, despite the cosmetic upgrades and visual tweaks. Mass Effect deserves better. While I’m not entirely thrilled with the initial offering, it’s not terrible. If you’ve got a PC that can run it well, the PC version runs circles around the Xbox 360 version, and is far and away the superior version. I’m hoping that the sequel will bring with it a truly realized version of the many concepts that get introduced in the original game, but never get fully realized. That, my friends, would be a breathtaking sight to behold.
