Introduction
Mass Effect is a at its core a third person RPG. Imagine the look and feel of a game like Bioware's previous Knights of the Old Republic mixed with the shooter mechanics lifted from Deus Ex. Sometime in the future, humans find some alien shit on Mars that lets us develop interstellar travel, where we meet all the alien races we share the galaxy with. As is usual in games, Bad Shit™ is going down and the player has to stop it. The game was released on the Xbox360, to much fanfare and awards. PC diehards like me were waiting for Bioware to bring it over to their old stomping grounds with much anticipation.
Gameplay
Like most really good RPGs, Mass Effect has a fairly in depth character creation system. You can only be a human, but you can customize pretty much every aspect of your character's appearance. Even minute facial features like the way the nose flares can be adjusted. There are six classes to choose from, consisting of three base types (Soldier, Engineer, and Adept) and three hybrid classes that combine two of the three base classes (the Infiltrator combines Soldiers and Engineers, Sentinels combine Adepts and Engineers, and Vanguards combine Soldiers with Adepts). Each class, as you'd expect, gives you different "talents" for you to spend points in. Nothing special going on there, just a solid base to build a game around.
Mass Effect's combat can basically be described as KotOR with guns. Each character carries one weapon of each type: pistol, shotgun, assault rifle, and sniper rifle. Each character class can spend their talent points (gained with new levels) in at least one or two weapon categories, increasing damage and accuracy with weapons of that type. In effect, gunplay in Mass Effect is similar to Deus Ex in that your skill in aiming at targets is still important (not dice roll based attacks here folks), but your accuracy depends on your skill with the weapons. There is a cover system in place as well. If you are in combat mode and run next to a wall or some kind of barrier, your back will move against it automatically. While your back is to a wall, you can shuffle to corners and pop out to take shots. It comes in handy in a few situations, but I found it to be somewhat annoying, turning me around at abdomen-high barriers and not letting me shoot enemies in front of me.
The rest of your time playing Mass Effect will be spent interacting with NPCs. As in KotOR, there are lots of NPCs littering the game world, some with mundane things to say, some conversing with other NPCs, and the more important ones that you can actually interact with. Dialog in Mass Effect is intuitive and gives you good control of what you say. Instead of showing you exactly the words your character will say, the dialog options represent the general idea of what you want Shepard to say. Some dialog options depend on your skill level in charm or intimidate, so having some points in those can help you avoid combat and get you some nice rewards. Most NPCs you can converse with have quite a lot to say, so if you like interaction (like me, hell I finished Dreamfall which is basically half dialog) then you can fully take in the well developed characters, or if you'd rather breeze through, you can skip most of the dialog after you've read it and just get on with it.
Once you first leave the Citadel, you have the freedom to explore the galaxy and completing quests, which generally involve landing on a planet and wiping out all resistance. The main plot quests are Obviously marked, so if you want to eschew all the side quests (admittedly they are rather repetitive, but they are good for getting XP and credits) it's easy to do so.
For some parts of the game, including most of the time on the side quest planets, you'll be piloting your ship's airdroppable IFV, the Mako. Generally it controls well, and it's well armed. Where it fails though is when you have to cover some extreme terrain. Believe me, unless you ignore the side quests, you are guaranteed to come across some nigh-on shear cliffs that you need to scale. It can be slow, tough going at times, and it is possible to get stuck.
Sights and Sounds
Mass Effect was developed using the Unreal 3 engine, and thus graphically it is pretty damn good. Characters and environments are incredibly detailed and beautifully textured. Faces have realistic texturing (i.e.: pores and such) and decent animation. Depth of field, the seeming lens flare/colored lighting/whatever new popular trend, is used to good effect here, as is its best pal motion blur. They're done tastefully though, so they don't stick out like they don't belong. You can also enable a film grain effect, which I though was okay enough to leave on, but it might annoy some people. You can see a comparison pic here. The game does have a few bugs with ATI GPUs with the shadows, they don't really look right, though the issue is supposedly being fixed in the next driver release.
Artistically though, Mass Effect really excels. Humans are pretty faithfully reproduced, but the true beauty is the impressive alien species designs. Each species is distinct, well rounded and, frankly, just really cool looking. Mass Effect features some amazing scenery as well, easily better than any game I can readily think of right now. Different planets have distinct environments, in turn lush, arid, barren, rocky, gaseous, almost anything you can think of, there's probably one planet of that type in Mass Effect.
Sound effects in Mass Effect are top notch. Explosions sound powerful, and each weapon and skill sound appropriate for their size. The ambient music is also nice, definitely better than it was in KotOR. I especially like the music that plays over the credits, and the star map music is nice too.
Stuff that sucks
My biggest complaint with the game is with the cover system in combat. It works similar to the system in Kane & Lynch, which worked OK for the most part, but when it didn't work made your life suck. For example, you're shooting at an enemy while advancing across an open space with crates spread around. If you walk up to a box in this situation, even though you're holding down fire and can easily see over the box, the game will sometimes decide to put you in cover mode, and now your back is facing the enemy, who can still see you and easily shoot the back of your head which is now on display. It is very frustrating at times. I think that it should take into account if you're trying to shoot over such half-height barriers like the crates and such that are seemingly abundant in space.
The shadow bug can be annoying, especially with all the time you can spend looking at people's faces. There are some manual tweaks that mitigate it, but seeing pixellated shadows on someone's face is just not cool.
Conclusion
Mass Effect is a brilliant game. The combat is satisfying, the graphics are (in general) quite good, the sound excellent, and the character interaction among the best I've encountered. Every gamer should at least try this game out. If you enjoyed Knights of the Old Republic, you will almost certainly enjoy Mass Effect, unless you really hate guns and shooting things in your games. If you were put off by KotOR's turned based combat, you should definitely check out this game, the combat is very different and much faster paced. One of the must play PC games this year, and a definite GOTY contender.
Score : 9.5/10
