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Saturday 9 February, 2008
GAMEPLAY
In the second play session of the game, I was introduced to more advanced aspects of the game. The story itself branched out a little and allowed for more
player choice as far as where your ship actually goes and what objectives you and your teammates are actually trying to complete. The enemies remain very interesting
and watching your characters grow and learn new abilities, while par for the course, is always exciting.
One fun aspect of Mass Effect is the weapon and armor customization. If you know that you are going to be fighting certain kinds of enemies you can customize
your entire team's armor and weapons to take advantage of certain characteristics of the challenges ahead. Although the manner in which this aspect of the game was
designed could have been better, that will have to wait for the next section. Sure enough though, I'm glad the feature is in there.
Another great aspect of Mass Effect is how your actions dictate your Renegade or Paragon meters (bad/good respectively, pretty much). While this has limited
effect on the game until bigger decisions are at hand, it's fun to get to roleplay a character, especially with a conversation system as excellent as Mass Effect's.
DESIGN
I think the general pace of Mass Effect is in itself not revolutionary, but unique and applauded. In playing it for some hours you find that you go through
phases of combat scene after combat scene, then slow the game down for a good 20 minutes by talking to person A who needs help with person B, then the cycle starts all
over. It works out very well in the end and makes for a great pace and flow for the game.
As I stated earlier the ability to customize not just characters themselves but their equipment as well is welcomed, but the interface and pace of doing so
could have been designed much better. It takes much too long to go through the unorganized list of upgrades available to a character who has been playing for more than
couple hours. The same goes for selling items. There is no traditional drag and drop inventory system. Instead you simply have a list of crud you are hauling around, most
of which you don't even want. The user interface for the inventory should have been scrapped and completley replaced, in my opinion.
One of the other flaws with the game is definitely how long it takes to pull resources from the disk. While Mass Effect is a beautiful game, it takes much too
long to get all the resources from the disk when moving to a new area, even taking an elevator to another level in the building you are already in (I figure many
of the same textures and what-not should be being reused in a situation like that). The designers should have made a HDD necessary in playing Mass Effect, or perhaps
added an option so that you could cache resources to your harddrive instead of spending up to a minute and a half waiting in an elevator.
Obviously, the game is more good than bad though. The game lends itself very well to varied environments and enemies given that you are indeed traveling from
galaxy to galaxy and planet to planet. The amount of artwork in the game is absolutely amazing. Varied characters, textures and sound all make for a great experience
that doesn't feel the same going from one world to the next.
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