I am proud to announce the debut of the newest addition to the Figures and More family: Correspondent Nick Morano. For his first assignment, Nick is reviewing one of the most anticipated games of the Holiday Season: Mass Effect for the X-Box 360. Here is his review

In many ways Mass Effect for the Xbox 360 is a fantastic game. I absolutely love this game however I am aware of some of its problems which I will address in this review. My biases towards the game will be kept out as much as possible. To start reviewing this game, one has to understand its roots. It is developed by Bioware, using the same team that worked on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 1 & 2. Many of the features that appeared in the KOTOR games appear in Mass Effect as well and this where the games biggest problem comes in. KOTOR was a phenomenal game that I still play to this day because of its storytelling and ahead-of-its-time game play innovations. Mass Effect sadly doesn’t follow suit. My biggest gripe is that it feels like a down grade from a game like KOTOR but alas, let me explain further.

In Mass Effect, you can lean your character more towards a crueler, Renegade side or you can lean towards a nice, Paragon side (more on that in a minute). First off, you get to choose between playing the default model of Shephard and creating your own. No matter what you do, you’re character’s last name is Shephard which feels a bit constraining but, for the purpose of voice acting, the reasoning is obvious. However, there aren’t enough options to customize your character and maybe I’m just being picky here but if you can alter the features of your character down to the scars they might have across their face, (which is extremely limited mind you), why shouldn’t you be able to pick a voice type for the character as well? I mean it is certainly not beyond the current technology. It would have been nice to have some more options when it came to customizing especially since that aspect of the game was played up quite a bit in any of the games ads/reviews/previews.

Gameplay wise it’s very well built. The idea of combining a real time RPG with a third person shooter works a lot better than I had expected. That being said there are still some problems. Every gun has unlimited ammo which is great. You acquire new and better guns and armor which you can either hold onto for your teammates or you can turn into omni gel, the games equivalent of “Jesus in a can.’’ All of the weapons and armor can be equipped with different upgrades such as giving your armor 40% resistance against Toxic damage or giving your pistol a 25% increase in damage to organics. This adds a lot of customization to your characters as does leveling up. Each character levels up at exactly the same time, whether they are in your party or not. When your characters level they get skill points which can be allocated to advance their skills. Each character is a different “class” so they have different skill sets. These skill points can be allocated automatically by pressing the Y button or you can customize your characters yourself which I highly recommend (as I was playing I tried the auto-assign twice and it kept giving my character 2 points in Shotguns when he never uses that type of gun). Anyway, you can switch back and forth in mid-battle between your different weapons depending on the situation. The problem with the guns is the accuracy reticle. It starts out very small when you are aiming and gradually gets bigger, with something like a shotgun this might not matter much, but for an assault rifle, it’s a pain. Not because it’s inaccurate though. It makes sense that if you just hold the fire button down you’ll be less accurate, that’s fine. It’s when you do that because you’re surrounded and then it takes literally around 1 whole minute to return to its most accurate point. While it may not seem like much, in a big fire fight/boss battle, that could be the difference between life and death. The other thing is overheating. It adds a distinct feel to the guns so you don’t just Halo your way through the game.

Games have recently been having some sort of Hacking minigame in them for some odd reason. Bioshock is one such game. Mass Effect does this as well. The premise is that in order to open security lockers and special storage containers, you have to hack into the system in order to bypass the lock and reap the rewards. This can be done one of two ways. If you have a character in your party with points in the Decryption and Electronics skills you can manually try to break the lock by playing a minigame. The minigame will consist of you pushing either the X, Y, A, or B button simultaneously as they light up on the screen. This is ridiculously easy and honestly I felt like they could have put a much more intuitive hacking system into the game. A retarded monkey shouldn’t be able to hack a computer for God’s sake. The other way to hack is with omni gel. I just have a problem with this idea in general. It basically says to the gamer “hey, lets take that EXTREMELY easy hacking minigame away because your ADD is that bad.” There is no valid reason whatsoever to have omni gel in the game. The only thing I’ve seen it good for is repairing you’re little dune buggy thing, the Mako, but you can only repair it a tiny tiny bit when it’s about to explode and kill you. And I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure if there was a substance in the future that would basically let you do anything, ONE PERSON would control it all cause I can imagine that’d be extremely valuable. Yet, you can obtain it by simply opening your equipment screen and discarding some unwanted armor or weapons. As for the Mako, that’s another problem as well. The damn thing steers terribly. If you are on flat surface with it, the controls are fairly responsive and tight. As soon as you hit a hill, the vehicle itself will turn whichever direction it feels like turning, regardless of whether or not going over the hill would have impacted it to turn in such a direction.

Now my biggest problem with this game: Morality. Every game that has tried to do the whole morality rating system has had major problems with it in my eyes. KOTOR was probably the best execution of the idea to date. In KOTOR2, you’re entire party would be affected by the light side or dark side decisions you made but the conversation text would not change regardless of your affiliation. In Fable, every little thing you did affected your morality and while you might be crusading to be a good person and one decision is enough to make you completely dark, ruining all your work. Mass Effect works similar to the first KOTOR. You character will always have a charm and intimidate skill which points can be added to in order to give you more options in some quest dialogues. When in conversation, these options will appear in blue for charm (Paragon) and red for intimidate (Renegade). Choosing these will give you some points towards whichever faction as well. The problem here is that it is too linear. They might as well have just asked you at the beginning of the game which type of character you want to play. The good/Paragon choices in conversation will always be in the top right of the dialogue wheel, neutral will be in the middle, and bad/Renegade will be in the bottom right corner. Any options that appear on the left (aside from the blue and red options) are for extra information. Occasionally a good or bad option might be on the left but not often to be careful. This makes the game suffer because it doesn’t feel real, not just that but Shephard only talks when you tell him what to say. I’m sorry but if I was receiving orders from a Commanding officer I’m not going to be a complete jerk/Renegade. There is no real reason why he can’t have some lines outside of what you choose. That’s a small thing though. The problem is that the dialogue options are too limited. At most you get like 6 different options, 3 on the right and left, but more often than not, each person you speak to will have the Investigate option on their left side. I just didn’t get the feeling that every decision I made affected the whole galaxy (like they hyped in the marketing). Not just that but your decisions didn’t affect dialogue too much.

Another problem is that the textures usually take a few seconds before they load both for the characters’ armor and the environment. And loading times suck. With the technology we have now, there should be no reason for loading screens. Its one thing to have something going on over these screens and another to see a big device with the words loading in small text at the bottom of the screen. Not just that but the loading when you are in an elevator seems like it takes forever. That is something that could have easily been fixed.

While there are plenty of side quests to be undertaken and a great list of achievements (which give the game even more replay value seeing as though most won’t be acquired in the first run through of the game), the game is too linear. There are no consequences for taking forever to do a side quest you got in the first hour of the game. Hard decisions my ass, you don’t have to make any concerning the general populace of the galaxy except to say “Where should I go first?”

All in all, this is an excellent game. While I have my misgivings and problems with the game, it is definitely fun to play and I highly recommend it to anyone who likes RPGs, you’ll get your money’s worth.

Mass Effect for the Xbox 360 scores a 4 out of 5.