Mass Effect
Mass Effect for the PC is a great sci-fi role playing action game with a great story and some fun shooting with a wide variety of customizable weapons.
Ratings: Graphics & Audio: 20/25, Gameplay: 22/25, Creativity 23/25, Fun 23/25
Total: 88/100
Mass Effect is a great sci-fi role playing action game with a great story and plenty of character building with a great base of weapons and gadgets. The game revolves around a story of a single person being able to find and discover the answers behind a great adversary and defeating him after finding out what he has been up to.
You start out as a general character with your options of character customization in looks and picking your special abilities or professional career path. You can alter this path along the way by choosing which abilities you level by letting the computer level up for you or picking where your ability points will go yourself.
You can choose to level up at specific abilities like certain weapons, technical abilities or what they dub biotics or magic. Your leveling will be a matter of personal choice according to your gameplay style as each ability and choice will be just as effective as the other only in different ways. If you choose to level up with particular weapons you can pick and choose which ones you use more effectively or become an expert of none and be able to use all five kinds at least somewhat.
Other choices will enable you to be balanced with your own character but you can also choose from your teammates and their skills to balance out your party. You can choose to not have to worry so much about being the only one in the group who can handle the technical portions of your adventure. The leveling and use of abilities makes for a nice and balanced gameplay for the most part.
The weapons is where Mass Effect shines as you can pick your choice of weapons from any you find in lockers or purchase and add on a variety of modifications as well as various ammunition upgrades. The weapon variations and always being able to upgrade them when you find better ones mean you will have a constant chance against many of the adversaries you come across with a weapons heavy character.
The combat works well whether you choose to make heavy use of weapons and rely more on the abilities of your fellow adventurers or use your own tech abilities and biotics more. You can choose to make your character according to one of three main ability groups and use weapons, technology or the biotics or what basically boils down to magic. The namesake of the game is Mass Effect which is an ability to manipulate mass which has been nicknamed Mass Effect.
This ability means the same thing as magic and your character will be able to hurt or make more vulnerable your opponents so that you can wound them or use the other members of your party to kill them with their weapons. The abilities work well and they balance each other out with the gameplay as long as you don’t pick your party too heavily on one ability type.
The game works very well with all the role playing elements and the story moves the pace along well, you will have a good amount of talking as well as choices in your conversations. The choices you make in your conversations will determine your niceness or good and evil but this doesn’t really change the story overall, just alters it a bit.
When you do choose to make decisions that are not exactly the more good natured ones you will become less of a friend to many of the characters who are your team mates and this affects how well you lead them. As long as you do decent with the main missionsseffect the team mates do not change the gameplay all that much and most of what they do for you is give ore targets for the enemies to shoot at.
The AI does a great job with picking a good fight and you do get a good workout while under fire but if you plan ahead and choose wisely when outfitting yourself and your team you can do well the first time. There will be times when you will have to revert back to saved game spots to redo areas as the game does have some flaws but is also pretty good at defeating you.
There are also some technical problems that are plaguing the PC version as sometimes characters get caught in scenery and geometry of the levels. A few times this happened to an extreme as I was launched through the level walls and passed beyond the level and kept going until the level itself was a tiny dot on the horizon. This happened a few times in the same spot until I avoided that corner and went the other way when the action started.
Other than a few glitches here and there the main problem I had was trying to use high graphical settings when playing the game which did not work. I had to lower the quality settings and not use anti aliasing so the game would not crash at some spots, once I had lowered the settings the rest of the game played through fine.
The graphics are really good for a role playing game but there are some graphic frame rate slowdowns due to a lot happening on screen if you use a lot of the biotics powers or just a lot of flashing and effects on screen at once. This and having to lower the quality settings were the only problems and the only things that really detracted from the game in any way. The story is great and there is plenty do in the main missions and all the side missions that allow for an easier time at leveling up and getting more gadgets to play with.
One thing that is apparent from the start there are all kinds of little things that work so well that make a complete and very well polished game. Things like combat and how easy it is to change from weapons to tech and abilities and using hotkeys for many of these quickly needed abilities works very well.
Mass Effect is a great game and one very much worth playing on the PC even with a few problems. It is a great adventure based on a solid science fiction story and long enough even with just the main mission to keep role playing enthusiasts entertained for days on end.