Mass Effect worth buying?

[Magusigne]

I've been trying to find a cheap copy of mass effect used but I'm just thinking of paying full price (39.99) for the PC version.

The combat system seems pretty strange, and unfortunately I saw yahtzee's review (which shouldn't be taken for anything but I tend to agree with most of his reviews).

I've heard it resembles Star Control 2 (My favorite game of all time)

any truth to this?

 

[Maximilian]

No idea what star control is, but im a die hard FPS fan and i had a blast with mass effect, awesome storyline, FPS like combat thats not overly complex. I thought all RPG's played out like final fantasy 7 but mass effect is more like halo with an awesome storyline and choices and a levelling system. Really good fun, i would recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good story.

 

[Bateluer]

The combat in Mass Effect is very first person shooter like, in fact, its identical. You have stats that improve, but ultimately, its your skill with the mouse that determines the combat outcome.

The storyline in ME is decent, though its nothing we haven't seen before, being ripped from several other major fantasy franchises.. Party interaction is nonexistent and the game is incredibly short. With all the side quests and taking your time, you'll beat the game in less than 12 hours. 8 if you rush through things.

On the positive side, the production values are very high, the voice acting is excellent, the visuals are excellent, etc. You'll enjoy the game for the weekend it takes you to beat it, but not much after that.

ME's DRM scheme, though a PITA, is almost irrelevent, because the game has next to no replayability.

 

[Magusigne]

Originally posted by: Bateluer
The combat in Mass Effect is very first person shooter like, in fact, its identical. You have stats that improve, but ultimately, its your skill with the mouse that determines the combat outcome.

The storyline in ME is decent, though its nothing we haven't seen before, being ripped from several other major fantasy franchises.. Party interaction is nonexistent and the game is incredibly short. With all the side quests and taking your time, you'll beat the game in less than 12 hours. 8 if you rush through things.

On the positive side, the production values are very high, the voice acting is excellent, the visuals are excellent, etc. You'll enjoy the game for the weekend it takes you to beat it, but not much after that.

ME's DRM scheme, though a PITA, is almost irrelevent, because the game has next to no replayability.

WoW...exactly what I needed to know! The Star control 2 reference was to the replayiblity and sand box esk kind of play I was anticipating. For some reason I heard 80 hours of play etc..

8-12 hours is not what I want.

(SIGH) WoW and War suck..EVE sucks..I can't find any good PC game time sinks..(besides zombie panic)...picking up guild wars...blah..

 

[Beev]

12 hours? I beg to differ. I took my time, and even skipped a few things, and the game took me 30 hours.

 

[Daverino]

The appeal of Mass Effect is the plot line and how you can influence it by your actions. If you've played other Bioware products like KOTOR, you know what I'm talking about. KOTOR and Mass Effect were the only two games I've played where I've ever felt like I was role playing, to be honest. I could decide on a persona before starting the game, choose dialog that fit with the persona, and people would react accordingly. The first Deus Ex had a glimmer of this as well.

Without the sidequests, the game is very short, yes. If you take your time and play all the sidequests, I'd say it's more like 20 hours. But that's really going out and exploring every planet. The payoff for doing this is you'll be very high level when you get around to doing the actual storyline of the game, in which case you will breeze through. There's a level cap at 50 for the first run and 60 for the second run, but I didn't feel the need to play it a second time. There are essentially three main builds for the game: sniper, gunner and psionic. I didn't find the engineer to be a useful character to play, although good to have in your team. All in all, it was worth the money just for the story. It didn't fascinate me like KOTOR did, but it didn't disappoint either.

 

[rivan]

I agree with most of the commentary here. I took my time playing, did all the side quests and ended up somewhere between 20-25 hours but wanting more.

I played it through twice, once as a 'good guy' and again making all the 'evil' choices. It's remarkable how similarly the plotlines progressed, but it was all well done.

Having a star map is the only resemblance to SC2. It's much more like KOTOR - I'm happy with my purchase.

 

[Liet]

Mass Effect could have been a great game, but it suffers severely from consolization and bad design. I agree about replayability - it has next to none... so if I miss something from this list, it's because I've forgotten about it and don't want to play it again.

1. Dialogue - Your choices don't match what the character actually says. You can usually guess from the choices which is the good/evil response, but it's still annoying when you choose "Get out of my way, you ugly alien!" and instead your character says "You're a doofus! I'm awesome! Rah!"

2. The "evil" path is a joke - There is no evil path. There's a good path, and an asshole path. You're not evil, you're the Diet Coke of Annoyance. Remember Mr. Freeze from Batman? He's a perfect example of a guy who's not evil, he'll just do whatever it takes to save his frozen wife. That's what Bioware should've done... a character who is ruthless, but not an asshole - just totally focused on completing the mission.

3. Inventory is terrible - There's no stacking, and you can see maybe 5 items on the whole screen. iirc, you also can't easily compare stats, so if you want to sell things for money, you'll need to try and make a mental note of what sucks and what's good. Fortunately money is abundant, and all you really need are the SPECTRE weapons.

4. Reused base layouts & textures - ARRRRGH, WHY ARE THERE ONLY 3 TYPES OF PIRATE BASES IN THE WHOLE UNIVERSE? WHY DO THEY ALL USE THE SAME EXACT TEXTURES?

EDIT: 5. - Driving around on different planets had no real purpose except to waste your time. The collection missions were there just to justify the devs' time in creating all that terrian. "Well, we created it... I guess we should find a way to make the player look at it over and over and over and over"

Ultimately, it was a nice play, but didn't come anwhere near the hype. Could've been a lot better if Bioware hadn't designed it for the T-for-Teen crowd.

 

[TheVrolok]

Originally posted by: Beev
12 hours? I beg to differ. I took my time, and even skipped a few things, and the game took me 30 hours.

Agreed. I did it in 19 on my first play-through and I didn't get the completionist award. So there's gotta be well more than 12 hours of gameplay.

 

[nakedfrog]

Originally posted by: TheVrolok

Originally posted by: Beev
12 hours? I beg to differ. I took my time, and even skipped a few things, and the game took me 30 hours.

Agreed. I did it in 19 on my first play-through and I didn't get the completionist award. So there's gotta be well more than 12 hours of gameplay.

Yep, 20 hours on my first play-through without trying to accomplish everything I could. At 24 now on my second play-through trying to do everything, and I haven't even started the Bring Down the Sky content.

 

[jonks]

Buy it, I played it through 3 times with different character classes. Combat, once you get used to it and get some "force powers" is AWESOME. It's like KoTor but real time instead of behind the scene dice rolls. Shortish for an RPG but plenty long enough to justify buying. Besides, do you really want every RPG to take 80 hours to get through? There's about 6-7 games I want to buy this quarter, have no idea how I'm going to get through them (FC2, fallout3, gtaIV, RA3, High School Musical 3...)

 

[skace]

Originally posted by: Liet
Mass Effect could have been a great game, but it suffers severely from consolization and bad design. I agree about replayability - it has next to none... so if I miss something from this list, it's because I've forgotten about it and don't want to play it again.

I agree with some of your points but disagree with your conclusion. Mass Effect is a great game, however it could have been much better. Bioware touched on the possibility of a game where you can explore a galaxy and actually land on each planet, that is something people have wanted for such a long time that when you finally get it you can just see so much more potential there. But that doesn't invalidate their attempt.

1. The dialogue matches your thoughts or reactions to what is being said, your character forms a response based on that. It's different, I'm not sure it was better, but I also wouldn't say it was worse. There were times where I picked something and was pleasantly surprised with what the main character ended up delivering and there were times when I regretted it. But it was interesting in that it's kind of like sometimes in real life when you react emotionally and then end up regretting what you said. The game mimics that to some degree by not letting you always mull over ever detail of your sentence wording.

2. That's because there is no evil path. There is a renegade path, and renegades aren't inherently bad. Some of their methods are questionable but they are legitimate. There is no "I'm here to fuck up the whole galaxy" alignment. They did this on purpose because while being funny it's entirely unrealistic approach that would leave your character without a ship stranded on a planet somewhere dying. They wanted a more grounded realistic choice, something where someone who meant good could end up straying down the renegade path because of their ideals.

3. Inventory is terrible.

4. The base textures, completely agree, however I'm 90% sure this is due to xbox360 memory limitations, also explains why the planets look the way they do (most are different colored ground texture but mostly barren).

5. While the driving didn't have a purpose, the game would have been more lacking if it had just delivered you right at your destination with no need to explore a planet. I'd say the only thing the driving added was atmosphere, giving you that feeling that you are being dropped off in these absolutely remote parts of the galaxy with nothing around but maybe a small base off in the distance.

Bring Down the Sky proved that the developers were learning from Mass Effect. The Asteroid you land on in BDTS has more things going on than any other side quest planet. It feels alive, the skybox is absolutely beautiful and the mine's were an interesting addition forcing the player to do something other than steam roll everything with the all powerful buggy.

 

[Garou24]

Mass Effect, I feel is a great game. If you like RPGs or even FPSs then you will like this game. I really enjoyed the storyline. Yes it pulls from other sci-fi films or games, but it was fun to follow along and it was engaging enough to keep me coming back for more.

The game never has felt short for me. I cannot imagine completing the game in 8 hours unless you had already played before and knew exactrly which quests to complete to advance the story. You are offered so many quests that just completing a few side quests will keep you busy for hours. I feel the replay value of the game is high also. I have played it through 3 times and still find new quests, NPCs and areas I had not found or explored before. There is even downloadable content, Bring Down the Sky, that provides new missions areas to explore.

The combat system plays like a first person shooter, and after a couple of minutes using it I felt at ease cycling through the weapons and powers. You have teammates that you can level up with you to take on missions. So during combat your able to select the weapons and powers they use, or you can have them select when to use their own powers.

The cutscenes and dialog sceens where well done. the visuals ans voice acting really made the game feel like a movie at times. You have a few optiosn for dialog and once you spend points in Charm or intimidate you get even more options that you normally would not have. The dialog options are short paraphrase of what you actually say. You click the option you want and thats the general feel of the message you want to get across, the actualy speech that is said might differe from the short 3 or 4 word option. i liked this as i could select the dialog optiona nd then i did not have to listen to the character say word for word what the text was on the option i just read.

The good or evil path seems fair most of the time. you can really be a good player, or there are times where you can let people die or kill them yourself as an evil person. And going the different paths will open or close certain quests or dialog with NPCs.

If you take your time to enjoy the game I think you will find you really enjoy it. Good luck!

 

[Liet]

Originally posted by: skace2. That's because there is no evil path. There is a renegade path, and renegades aren't inherently bad. Some of their methods are questionable but they are legitimate.

Sorry if I wasn't clear enough - I REALLY liked the idea of a path that wasn't full-on evil, just had a different motivation. Unfortunately, instead of a character whose motivations you can understand, Mass Effect just gave us someone who was an asshole, and there was no motivation behind it. The dialogue choices were nonsensical and showed they had no clue what they wanted to do with the Renegade path.

"Well Mr. Main Character, my people were almost wiped out by the society you are trying to protect, and most of us are infertile. It's really quite tragic, and soon there will be none of us left. I'll tell you about the relationship with my father, if you like"

"Your culture smells like poopy and your face is dumb"

"Excuse me?"

"Your culture is weak and dumb and silly. Yes, I said it. Don't ask why, because I don't really know. In fact, the only reason that dialogue choice was there is to give the player some Renegade points. It has no bearing on anything whatsoever."

"Oh."

 

[Martimus]

Mass Effect was fun. It isn't as time consuming as Oblivion, and the choices you make don't have as much effect on the game as the Witcher, but it does have a great story line and is somewhat like an interactive movie for that reason. The side quests can get a little dumb at times though. I was glad to have played it, and if it wasn't for the crap DRM I would have probably played it more (I reformated and didn't want to put SecuROM back on my system.)

 

[CP5670]

I'm not a regular RPG player but I liked ME a lot, mainly due to its wide range of dialogue options. At the same time though, it did have numerous flaws.

This game can be dramatically improved by binding the Unreal engine's slomo command to a key to speed up the game. Your guy moves very slowly by default and there is no way to upgrade your speed, so you end up wasting a lot of time just running around between places. I found the game far more enjoyable after I started using this.

The story had tons of detail and they put a lot of effort into fleshing out the universe. It's not particularly realistic though and is very reminiscent of Star Wars, essentially a fantasy that happens to be set in space.

The base game is very short, with only five or six main missions. There are numerous side quests but most of them are quite tedious, since they just reuse the same level design over and over again. I did them just to see the final conversations associated with them. My total time was 32 hours after doing all of them, except for the ones about finding minerals (although the actual time was less since I went through all the boring parts on quad speed).

The combat in general is very easy, and I only remember two or three parts that posed any challenge at all. Your squad mates are quite worthless in combat, even if you keep upgrading their equipment, but you can easily handle everything on your own.

The graphics are subpar for such a recent game, despite the relatively poor performance. A few areas have good artwork but it generally looks very similar to Unreal 2, a 2003 game.

 

[MagicConch]

mass effect is an okay game imo. In some ways it was more cinematic than most rpgs and that was fun.

however it does get tiresome after a while. there is only one real city and much of the game looks the same over and over again. each planet is filled with the same buildings, and there is copius amounts of gear everywhere so much shopping becomes uninteresting except for a few select items. i never had that moment where i completely forgot i was playing a game and got completely sucked into the story like KoTor for example.

Still worth $40 imo.

 

[ConstipatedVigilante]

It's a fun game, but I can't believe how short it is. I'm not finished yet, but I'm nearing the climax of the story and it's only been something like 10 hours of play (maybe less). I was expecting some more interaction with the council for different missions. I like the way the plot forces you to make important choices, though (I'm not going to post spoilers).

And by the way, I don't demand that a game be 50 hours long to be of decent length. Call of Duty 4's campaign was great because the whole thing was like a movie - there was just so much going on, so it didn't feel that short.

 

[zerodeefex]

I took my time and did everything, got all the crap in the galaxy, etc on the 360 version and clocked in somewhere in the high 40s, possibly low 50s with bring down the sky. I'm going to pick this up for PC now that I got rid of my 360 and play through it again.

 

[MustangSVT]

I dunno whats missing but none of the RPGs I play have the "hook" that Baldur's gate series had.

I can't seem to get into mass effect at all.

did you know Mother 3 has been translated? I should play that

 

[gorcorps]

Originally posted by: Bateluer
The combat in Mass Effect is very first person shooter like, in fact, its identical. You have stats that improve, but ultimately, its your skill with the mouse that determines the combat outcome.

The storyline in ME is decent, though its nothing we haven't seen before, being ripped from several other major fantasy franchises.. Party interaction is nonexistent and the game is incredibly short. With all the side quests and taking your time, you'll beat the game in less than 12 hours. 8 if you rush through things.

On the positive side, the production values are very high, the voice acting is excellent, the visuals are excellent, etc. You'll enjoy the game for the weekend it takes you to beat it, but not much after that.

ME's DRM scheme, though a PITA, is almost irrelevent, because the game has next to no replayability.

Jesus fucking lord, I'm already in at 17 hrs right now and I have no idea how much left I have. Seems like I should have a decent amount more. I just finished the part ****SPOILER ALERT**** where you set the nuke, fight Saren (sp?) a bit, and choose whether to save Ashley or Kaiden. How much is left?

 

[Liet]

iirc, you're almost near the end. A few more hours should do it.

 

[DefRef]

The people who are claiming they finished it in 12 hours are either liars or dopes who hammered the dialog skip button and refused to anything more than the bare minimum to complete the main quests. I can't recall how long I spent on the X360, but I put in at least 30 hours and didn't even get the Completionist achievement, so there must've been hella more to do. I am so tired of hyperactive little speds, guzzling Bawls and processed snack foods, blazing thru games and then whining that games are too short and dissuading others from enjoying a good game.

There's an achievement in GTA IV for completing the main story in less than 30 hours. When I finally finished it, I had spent 60 hours and was at ~65% completion. I played the game and got 2/3rds of the included experience. Sometimes I did dates and sports, others I was just in the mood for vigilante and racing missions. Point is that if I ignored all the flavor and just raced thru the game in <30 hours, would I be justified in coming here and telling people, "Don't buy GTA IV!!! It's too short!!!"? Of course not.

Mass Effect may not be the Greatest. Game. EVAR!, but it is quite good and I didn't regret my $60 expenditure on purchasing it.

 

[ConstipatedVigilante]

@DefRef, it's not that people rush through it. Some people just take a hell of a long time to do anything in the game. My dad played Doom3 and Oblivion, but he would go so slowly since he's not used to playing shooting games that it took forever to get to the end (he kept at it, though - but my brothers and I had to kill the bosses for him).

 

[nakedfrog]

Originally posted by: ConstipatedVigilante
@DefRef, it's not that people rush through it. Some people just take a hell of a long time to do anything in the game. My dad played Doom3 and Oblivion, but he would go so slowly since he's not used to playing shooting games that it took forever to get to the end (he kept at it, though - but my brothers and I had to kill the bosses for him).

Be that as it may, I'm certain anyone that finished ME in 8-12 hours most certainly did rush through it.