MASS EFFECT Review

MASS EFFECT is a game that has been both blessed and cursed with a littel thing i like to call 'hype fever' symptomes include, gaming magezines publishing 8-page and up spreads on said game and crazy cliams being made in big shouty letters like this "THIS IS THE GAME OF THIS (console)GENERATION!!!" on posters and the like. Recent monthes have seen 'hype fever' reach almost pandemec level with barely a month going by with out some game suffering through it, and when i say suffering i mean it hype is is the most deadly of all the double edged swords, with a positive that is worth its weight in gold(publcity) and a con that could ruin the game (not living up to the hype).

Over last year i saw a few game suffer a serious(if not terminal) blow at the hands of hype fever, the one that jumps to mind is bioshock with so many promises made (and some of the more important ones being kept "great story any one?") but i wont linger on that lets just say that it wasnt all that.

MASS EFFECT is a great game lets make no mistake taken for what it is it is a fun engaging space opera with a likable cast of charters and a accesable combat and leveling up system that makes it easyer for all of the RPG virgens (like me!) to get to gripes with the depth which the game hides beneath its sleek graphics(more on them later) so just bear that in mind as i point out every littel trivial problem because here arent any big ones.

I will start from the beginning of the game, by that i mean i will take you through the charecter building screen and all that jazz. So on my first playthrough i made my own charcter to see how much freedom i had to make an ugly sod and i almost instantly ran in to a problem and that problem was a lack of choice and a interface that was frustrating to use i found my self just calling him titty and staring to play witch is never a good sign in a game like this, but in retrospect i think that those of you familer with that kind of screen (maybe bioware use that setup for all there games this is the only one i have played)then it will not be a problem? and if that is the case then ignore all that stuff about it being hard to use. maybe i am just thick?

So moving on to the main game. as soon as the first video was over you go striaght in to a conversasion with the pilot of your ship(who is voiced by seth green...just so you know!) and you get to see the graphics in action, and the first thing that struck me was "wow all the humans look like play-doug but the aliens look real!" and that was for me a really bad point, if you cant make humans look real then why the hell is it that the aliens look like i could touch them?there are some serious problems with your engine. and that leads on nicly on to my next point, and that is that the engine sometimes lags to fuck! with a gunfight being nothing more that a mess of disjounted frames and sound effects the last bit of the game suffers the most for this since it has some rather spectacular stuff going on in the backround.

On the plus side the leveling-up system is very well used and the enmies dont level-up with you ala Oblivion! so that is a plus and you can use the charcter from your last play through in the next campign witch makes getting some of the achevments easier, but this also has a flaw to it in that you also keep all the swag you had at the end of the last play through witch can be worth a rather insane amount of money giving you a lot of spare cash to by all the best armour and guns.
that final point could be good or bad depending on your view but i think it is a mixed blessing.

So to rap this all up MASS EFFECT is a flawed game but if you can look past the somtimes juddery frame rates and the play-doug humans you will find a deep exciting world to lose your self in for 20 hours, and in the end that is what gaming is all about.

also it has shagging whitch is always welcome!

score 85%