Massive Fun (2009-06-30)
Mass Effect is one of the best games I ever played. It sets a benchmark for third person role playing games. It is as close to a DVD movie as a video game can get, because, unlike most first person games, the player can see and hear the player character as well as the non-player characters. The dialog wheel is innovative. When used properly, it delivers a continuous dialog, without interruptions. I first played the male Commander Shepard as a soldier, in his heavy combat armor, lugging an arsenal of heavy weapons, and that was fun. Then I played the blonde hair, blue eye female Commander Shepard as a vanguard, in her form hugging light armor, wielding her light side arms and awesome biotic power, and, Leaping Lizard, that was ten times as much fun! The story was riveting; I am surprised if a movie is not made of the game when all is said and done. The graphics was spectacular; I was mesmerized by the scenery of the underground Archive and the Aqua Duct, leading up to The Conduit, on the planet Ilos. I can't wait till Mass Effect II is released in 2010.

Rises above its shortcomings (2009-06-29)
This game is a lot better than the sum of its parts. That's because this game has what other games lack: an emotionally gripping story that makes you feel like the lead character in a gigantic feature film. You really become the character and get swept up into the emotions and drama of an epic space opera. Individual elements from other games might be better, and there are plenty of glitches, and lame aspects of the game. But in the end you plow through all the downsides and let your imagination take flight, identifying with the character and living the story in your mind.

I do have some major gripes that I hope the company resolves in future releases. There's WAY too much running around empty corridors and standing around in empty elevators. The interiors of all the various colonies, outposts, and settlements (aside from the those that feature in the main plot) are all the same. Literally, there are like, 5 architectural models used over and over again.There is a maddening amount of driving around endless rocky landscapes in a stupid APC. The landscapes of all the planets is practically identical. Sometimes you can drive around one of these awful landscapes, agonizingly scaling mountains with your big car, in pursuit of a mystery blip on your map, finally locate the "crashed escape pod" and uncover...a cache of some grenades you already have a zillion of! Arrgggghh. Stupid!

A lot of the combat, especially the combat you engage in during the side quests, is repetitive. Many of the side quests are completely lame and stupid. The NPC interaction with your crewmembers is a little shallow--for example, in KOTOR you had much deeper relationships with the various companions you picked up along the way. You could even coach some of them into becoming Jedi! Hell, back in Baldur's Gate II you could have a romance!

The money system, and the buying and selling, are useless. The only reason to even go to a merchant is to unload your excess inventory. You can get through the whole game on the total overabundance of free stuff you find in all the lockers, compartments, crashed probes, etc., etc.

But there are some major, major things to love here, as well. I like that the combat is more "hands on" and visceral than in KOTOR, but that there's still a tactical element to it. I really enjoy the combination of the tactics involved with leveling up, customizing weapons, choosing the appropriate weapon for the particular fight, pausing the combat to consider the various powers and weapon choices, choosing your companions and getting to do all the same for them. I like the fact that you can heavily manage the squad or let the AI do the work. (I wish sometimes you could leave the squad behind on the ship, though. Sometimes I just command them to wait way back while I do all the fighting myself...)

The voice acting is marvelous, including the work of the famous names like Lance Henrikson, Seth Green, Marina Sirtis, etc. I played a female, and her voice was just exceptional. The way the characters are animated, including facial expressions, is amazing. You really find yourself identifying with your character's facial expressions!

By the time I got to the end, I was really engrossed in this game. I played through every side quest and visited/surveyed/landed on just about every planet possible. Even though I found myself annoyed and frustrated by all the trudging around, whether on foot or in that stupid tank, and had to reload a bunch of times due to glitching and getting stuck on objects, I truly loved this game and am looking forward anxiously to the sequel. That being said, if I were to play this through a second time, I'd be really tempted to skip most of the side quests and stick to the main plot, even though that would mean missing out on a lot of leveling up.


One thought for everyone out there though: would you rather have this game, or would you just rather have had them "remaster", refresh, and update KOTOR I and II for this next gen console??? Or better yet, would you rather have them re-create a Baldur's Gate game for the XB360? Think about it...

Mass Effect (2009-06-29)
I've had it for over 2 weeks and i still haven't completed it yet. It is simply amazing. The story line, so far, has been riveting and I am always captured in amazement. There is only so much an RPG can pack into one disc and Mass Effect has given me everything; Great graphics, good mechanics, multiple character control, and all sorts of upgrades.

amazing (2009-06-24)
There's a question as to whether this is the best XBox game or just one of the best. That's about it. So play it, if you havent. Play it a second time if you've only played it once.

An Excellent Space Epic Adventure (2009-06-19)
I admit I was favorably predisposed to this game because I've played every console roleplaying game that's been released by Bioware and loved them all. If a company has a good track record, that speaks volumes. I'm happy to say, Mass Effect follows true to form. I'm currently on my fifth play-through.

GAMEPLAY-5 Stars
The scale of Mass Effect is unbeaten when compared to any other science fiction game on a console. Most give you one planet to explore, plus a few sections where you fly a plane or spaceship around to shoot down enemies. In some sci-fi games, that's what you're limited to doing: being stuck in a cockpit. Mass Effect is ground-based, but you're given almost twenty-five planets and moons to wander around on, with numerous other ones to survey. There are environmental hazards to worry about, such as excessive cold or heat or air pressure and you DON'T want to go wading around in any lava you run across, but the areas to explore are huge. Most of the time, you find yourself breaking ground on uncharted territory. You may also find yourself boarding derelict spacecraft in search of pirates, mercenaries or... other things. And you don't just run around killing everything you run across. Part of the thrill of science fiction is exploration. Here, in your travels, if you have the patience, you might happen upon a mineral deposit to stake a claim on for any future Human Systems Alliance operations. You can check out the odd crashed probe (or one on a timer that's been specially PLACED for you to find by a galactic crime lord; nice to have friends, huh?). You might also find some ancient alien debris that wasn't previously listed in the ship's system archives. And any of these discoveries might lead you down additional paths to venture that you didn't know of before. It all goes toward the question: how much do you WANT to do here?

The controls in-game are fairly intuitive and quite easy to learn, and they are responsive enough that you don't find yourself jammed up in a tight situation. Just make sure YOUR reaction speed is up to par, because the difficulty levels are quite distinctive for each one you play at. I died several times at points on the Intermediate level of difficulty that gave me no trouble whatsoever on the Casual level. I can't imagine what the Hardcore difficulty level is like.

The mechanics of Mass Effect are class-based; your talents are specific to which type of character you want to play. There are six classes to choose from initially and during the course of your investigation, you're presented with an optional mission that, upon successful completion, allows you to choose a specialized class that grants you bonus abilities. There are no statistics as such; when you pull up your character's profile, you won't see things like Strength, Intelligence, Vigor or the like. Instead each class has specific qualities called talents. These are your character's class skills, granting proficiency in firearms, healing, electronic bypassing of security systems and biotic power (Mass Effect's version of mental powers) among others, depending on which class you choose at the onset of the game. Even though you can use any weapon type, even if it's not part of your particular skill set, you just won't be able to use that weapon as effectively as the team members who ARE trained with it. For armor, the game takes the stance that, if you're not skilled in the heavier types, you simply can't equip them. As you progress in your chosen class higher grades of personal equipment become available, as well as better upgrades that you can use to modify your weapons and armor with. These range from force field, recuperative and exoskeletal enhancements for your armor, to damage, sustained rate of fire and accuracy mods for your weapons.

You have the option to either accept the pregenerated character the game provides for you, or you can customize your appearance, gender and class to suit your own preferences. There are quite a wide range of appearances available for you to choose for either gender.

You control a three-member team on your excursions, all based on a third-person perspective. You control each member's actions through a decision wheel activated by pressing either the left or right bumper. The left bumper dictates the weapon that team member uses during the firefights and the right bumper controls the skill the member will use primarily. You can also order that person to advance, seek cover and guard you (as Shepard).

You're also given a vehicle, the Mako, a six-wheeled armed ATV for your travels planetside. If you're familiar with the way the Warthog or the tank handled in the Halo games, you should have no problem getting your way around the countryside. If you get stuck up in the terrain, the Mako has a slight jump-jet capability to shake yourself loose. It also has a self-repair function if you find yourself taking a lot of damage, activated by pressing the Y button on your controller. Warning: this function only works if you have enough omni-gel (if you already have enough money to buy what you need, you might consider converting any extraneous equipment in your inventory into omni-gel to build up your supply) to use on the repairs and during the process of repair, you're helpless. You can't move or shoot at enemies, so make sure you've gotten to a safe place before you decide to lick your wounds, ESPECIALLY if you're squaring off against a Thresher Maw. Their acid spittle attacks bypass the Mako's shields entirely.

STORY-5 Stars
It's a topic that's been addressed many times before (in 'The Terminator', 'The Matrix', 'Battlestar Galactica', among other examples), but Bioware puts a fresh spin on it. In the future (present year in Mass Effect is 2183 AD by human reckoning), mankind has spent two decades rubbing shoulders among the other cultures of the stellar community. You play Commander Shepard, a marine in the Human Systems Alliance military, en route to Eden Prime, an Alliance colony world. Your mission, and you DO choose to accept it, is to investigate an attack on the colony's starbase by an artifically-created synthetic species called the Geth. You ultimately discover something far more sinister that's behind the attack and everything is quickly coming to a head, threatening to repeat a fifty-thousand year cycle of galactic genocide.

Bioware is famous for putting a twist into the plot of their games that hits you between the eyes right when you're not expecting it, sometimes causing you to blurt out "Holy $h/t!!". It's a little more subtle in Mass Effect, but the result is no less profound. You still at least go "Hunh..." when the light bulb goes on. Also, the top developers in the company used to be doctors of one kind or another, and their technical expertise and the knowledge that they provide to this production adds a gritty sense of realism that adds to the flavor.

SOUND-5 Stars
I've heard it said that sound can either make or break a production. The sound in Mass Effect does absolutely NO disservice to the game. Simply put, it's awesome. The music score matches the science fiction setting perfectly, measuring just the right balance between orchestral and techno-electronic, and it adapts to a more hectic tempo if you find yourself in a tight situation, such as a firefight.

The voice acting is superb. They contracted out with both actors Lance Henriksen and Keith David for a couple of prominent characters. The rest of the voice actors do excellent jobs. They don't come off as wooden or uninspired and the voices match the visual representations of the characters portrayed perfectly. Granted, all the dialogue is given with North American accents, but you can only get so 'alien' with a character and its motivations before you lose the ability to connect with him or her (or 'it', as the case may be in a science fiction setting) in any kind of emotional capacity, especially in a game.

GRAPHICS-4 Stars
The visuals in Mass Effect are near photo-realistic. The character's movements are fluid and the facial features convey natural emotive responses according to the given dialogue.

The area draw distances are pretty much line of sight. You can see all the way to the horizon and the lighting and shading effects put you THERE, where your character is. There's nothing like driving the Mako across the landscape of a planet under the soft crimson glow of that star system's red giant primary or wandering around an abandoned scavenger's base camp while the air contains a green haze from the toxic levels of chlorine in the atmosphere, or being caught in a firefight with the Geth while there's a meteor shower going on all around you. The thrill of exploration is there and it's never let me get bored throughout each of the playthroughs I've had.

The reason I give this section 4 stars is the lack of variety in the architecture. I watched an interview with project lead Casey Hudson and he mentioned the variety of missions you could undertake and one of the examples he gave was exploring derelict space stations. The ships that you're able to board are all based on the same 'Kowloon'-class modular cutter design, and while they might shift the furniture around on each one, it all gets a little cookie-cutter after a while. Same goes with the ground bases. Also, the square footage of these places isn't a whole lot, so there is no real danger of getting lost during your explorations. There IS more variety in the main adventure missions and that just lends to the feeling that everything else is incidental, put in just for make-work to give you something to do. It would've been nice to explore a real HUGE space station from time to time, maybe running the risk of waking something up from hibernation that doesn't have anything to do with the main theme of the game (but could ADD to it later on) to enhance the sense of the unknown. In their defense, the do give you a generous side mission you can download from XBOX Live to play with. Also, while the load times are relatively short, it takes the detailed texture mapping a couple of seconds to catch up to the character models. I have a feeling that the designers did it that way to KEEP the delays between areas down, but it kind of screws with your suspension of disbelief to have the graphics try to play catch-up to the gameplay. I would've preferred longer load times to make sure everything was all set up from the start.

REPLAY-5 Stars
This game gives you enough variety, both in the missions, areas to explore and with the choice of how you, as a human, make our first impression on the rest of the universe, to give you several hundred hours worth of escapism and enjoyment. I, right now, have about 450 hours invested in this game and I've loved every minute of it.

OVERALL-5 Stars
There's a phrase that comes to mind from back in the day when I used to listen to the commentators while watching pro-wrestling (before mixed martial arts made its appearance): 'Excellence of Execution'. That's the most relevant way I can describe this game. I love my wife. I love science fiction. I love adventure. I love roleplaying games. Mass Effect delivers up the last three helpings as a seven-course meal. Honestly, if they don't make a feature film out of this at some point, I'll be very surprised. Two thumbs up.