Last weekend I finished Mass Effect on my Xbox 360, again another pretty good game. It took me about 23 hours to complete it, although if I just did the core quest I am pretty sure it could be completed in fewer than ten but more on this later.
Mass Effect was produced by Bioware, this is the same company who did the Baulders Gate series of games. I finished the game as a soldier although there is about six or seven different class’s that you can be. The solder seemed to be the straightest forward so that was the class I choose.
The graphics in Mass Effect are pretty good and the game does support 1080P so it does look amazing. The sound is also pretty good, with the weapons sounding really good. I have three main complaints about Mass Effect, well two complaints and one comment.
The first is that the core quest is really short again maybe 10 hours, but I think that is stretching it. There is a lot of is side quests but they are pointless unless you wanting gaming points. You do not really get any special equipment from doing them and they are extremely repetitive. Most of the side quests involve go to planet X and kill XYZ in the same building as the previous 15 side quests. They clearly did not spend any time on the side quest, I swear they just wrote a random quest generator or something. The main quest has a lot of thought to it with different locations and dialogue.
While the side quests are annoying the load screens or sorry the elevator rides almost ruined the game for me, I am sure they did for some people. Rather then doing loading screens in Mass Effect you take very long elevator rides, which seem to take for ever. It gets really annoying when you have to go the top floor of level to do something and then go all the way back to the bottom taking several elevator rides.
There is technical reason for all the elevator rides and that is that game does not load anything onto the Xbox 360. Everything is read off the disk and loaded into memory and this just takes time. I have an Xbox 360 Elite so I have a large hard drive, I would have liked them to use this hard drive and load some of game files on to the hard drive or at least give me the option to do so. If they did this the game would have been much more enjoyable, early on I actually fall asleep during one of the longer rides.
My last complaint but really more a comment is that the controls in Mass Effect are pretty good and tight with one exception the driving parts in the M35 Mako. Most of the game is spent on foot but there is a significant time where you are driving the M35 Mako and the controls in this section of the games are horrible. What makes it worse you have to fight enemies using it. The controls work and the driving areas of the game are playable but the controls are very loose. It is also humorous the capabilities of the Mako it can drive up almost vertical walls roll down mountains and not get damaged.
Despite the couple of short coming in Mass Effect I would suggest that anyone who likes RPG’s should give Mass Effect a try. If you can tolerate the loading screens, I mean Elevator rides you will really enjoy this game. I am considering playing through the game again on a higher skill level which is uncommon for me. I never replay RPG games, but this game was fun enough and well the main quest is short enough that I am considering.
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