Mass Effect

Power armour? Check. Assault rifle? Oh yeah. Morally challenging storyline and epic plot? Absolutely.

BioWare is one of the biggest leading lights of computer RPG design – outside of Japan, at least. The company cemented its reputation with Knights of the Old Republic, the tale of the ancient war between Sith and Jedi, and before then it had made a name with the excellent Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights D&D-based RPGs. Jade Empire continued the trend, and showed that BioWare could handle a ground up property as well as they could one based off of more traditional pen-and-paper games.

And now Mass Effect is here, arguably the most anticipated game that BioWare has ever developed. Has the wait – and the hype – been worth it?

It’s a shame that that question is not an easy one to answer.

On the side of rampant fanboi-ism is the fact that Mass Effect is a game of incredible depth. Quite literally, you will not find a more well-constructed or well-presented universe outside of a multi-novel sci-fi epic. During our run through of the game we levelled up the main character on more than one occasion simply by discovering new details about the game world and its inhabitants.

On the side of the less-than-thrilled is the fact that many important game sub-systems – like inventory management, to name one huge lurking bugbear – seem ill-thought out or just plain rushed.

Everything starts swimmingly, however. The first thing you get to do is create your character – regardless of the gender you want to play, you’re stuck with the last name of Shepard and a set number of background options to choose from. It seems limiting at first, but as the game progresses this becomes an excellent design choice. You can choose a first name of your own, and the actual physical characteristics you can play with are very complete – we had no trouble making our Commander Ulysses T Shepard look not unlike Captain Richard Winters in the Band of Brothers TV series.

The action starts pretty much right away – you command the marine detachment aboard a human frigate responding to a colony distress call, which, of course, is the prelude to matters of incredible galactic importance.

There’s this ancient race, the Protheans, you see, who built all this marvellous technology millennia ago then politely buggered off somewhere. It’s this hold-over tech that much of the modern galactic civilisation is built on, including the Mass Relays that fling starships all over the galaxy in the blink of an eye. It’s not an incredibly fresh idea, but it is a time-tested classic.

But it appears they didn’t go quietly into that long night, and that whatever happened to them might be about to happen to modern civilisation, and it’s up to Shepard to stop it.

It’s a simple tale on paper, but there are layers that unfold during the course of the game. Humans have only recently arrived on the galactic stage, for instance, and Shepard must prove himself, and humanity, worthy of inclusion in these grave matters before he can even get about saving the day. At the same time as Shepard is trying to impress his new bosses (and possibly piss off his old human ones), he’s got to keep his ragtag collection of NPC crew happy as well.



All of this crew and NPC interaction is driven by hundreds of hours of scripted dialogue, and chosen from some of the most organic dialogue trees we’ve ever seen. Conversations flow, arguments can be riposted, and the voice-acting is almost all top notch. What’s more, there’s some real punch behind the decisions you make, and a conversation you cut short because you’re pissed off might come back to haunt you.

As we said, the story-telling is top notch, and helping you make the right decisions is the incredible amount of background detail that you gather in your Codex (this game’s equivalent of the ubiquitous RPG staple, the journal). Technology, history, people, places... every time you visit a planet, find new tech, and even in some conversations, you get new info on the Mass Effect universe. There’s so much info to gather, and it’s such interesting stuff, that some of our play sessions were little more than research and reading through the Codex.

But, also as we said, there are problems.

Say what you will about the D20-based system used in KOTOR and the Forgotten Realms games of BioWare’s past, but at least it was a transparent and easy to understand system. The same cannot be said of the proprietary mechanics used in Mass Effect.



There’s the usual spread of character types, from the tough Soldier to the game’s spell-casting class, the Biotic, and all in between; however, the game itself is so combat heavy that any non-soldier class is immediately hamstrung.

As you level your character, you can put points into skills, which in turn unlocks special abilities. It seems simple, but some skills don’t actually add anything active – rather, they boost things like healing rate and shield recharge across the party. Other skills, like Assault Rifle for instance, directly improve accuracy, but given that combat is essentially a third person action game, those skill increases are not always apparent.

Mass Effect uses the Unreal Engine 3 to drive its pretties, and the game does look great, but some action sequences, or particularly large areas, cause a staggering drop in frame rate. Combine this with an intrusive and mood-shattering series of near random load times, where the action freezes and a disc icon flashes on the screen (and don’t get us started on how easy it is to mistake that message for the auto-save dialogue... grr!), and all the great work of the game’s writers and voice actors can quickly come undone.

The problems with Mass Effect do not stop the game being a good, or even a great, experience. Any RPG fan should just go and buy it now. But they do stop it being a perfect one. BioWare’s still one of the best in the field, but with smaller companies releasing great titles like The Witcher, BioWare cannot rest on its laurels.