Mass Effect - draft review

(This is an early draft review, not complete; I'm just uploading it to easily show it to a few friends. Bear with me.)

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So, Mass Effect,
then. A game that got so much right, and so much wrong.

Oh, it’s a great game, no question about that. The graphics
are unfailingly gorgeous, the story is engaging and well thought out, and of
course the dialogue has the quality scripting and voice acting that we’ve come
to expect from Bioware.

In fact, if you only play the main story, there really is
very little keeping the game from perfection; it is then perhaps a bit short,
but there’s still a good ten or twelve hours’ play there. I could mention the
phenomenal settings of the main story sites, particularly the inside of the
Citadel; I could mention the fun mod system for weapons and armour, with
effects that can actually be seen; in fact, I even enjoyed driving the Mako,
but maybe that’s just me.

But then they go and do a whole bunch of things very
slightly wrong, which isn’t a problem in itself; lots of good games have done
things very slightly wrong and got away with it. No, the problem is that
they’ve done things wrong that we know from previous games they can do right.

Take something as simple as the setting, for instance.
Previous games, particularly the KOTOR series, have consisted of lots of
worlds, each highly individual, with every area and subquest visually distinct.
It’s great, it gives every single location a feel of its own, and adds to the
believability of the universe.

And in Mass Effect,
they’ve continued that; the Prothean city on Feros, for instance, is little
short of spectacular once you get out of the catacombs, and the planet which
kicks off the endgame is a lush, overgrown ancient high-tech city that really
wouldn’t look out of place in some sort of sci-fi Indiana Jones. Bioware really
do know how to make spectacular settings.

The problem is, the individual locations are limited to the
main plot locations. All the other planets you can drive around on are
basically the same craggy-mountains-with-flat-bits painted different colours
and with different weather. Every time you land on a planet you can be fairly
sure that you’ll find two ore deposits, one to three pieces of wreckage, and
some form of habitation. About half the time they’ll throw in a bloody great
Tyranid Graboid thing to liven things up.

At least, though, the planets look different, if only thanks to the incredible sky textures. The
real trouble starts when you go indoors.

Indoors, you see, anywhere that’s not on the main plot
thread, there are really only five interiors. Dank Mine, Big Warehouse, Spaceship,
Big Room With Pillars and... er... okay, four interiors. They’re not even
retextured; they’re just those same four interiors with different arrangements
of the same props and furniture. They don’t even retexture them or change the
layout to make them interesting.

Which is fair enough, I suppose. It saves time and money in
development, and after all, it’s not like anyone’s going to try to complete all
the side quests, is it? Oh, hang on...

The bottom line is that the side quests quickly become a
case of going through the motions; go in, get the crate in the empty first
room, kill all the enemies in the big second room, move on to the two back
rooms and use the object there. Roll a D6; on a 5 or 6, spawn half a dozen
extra enemies. Lather, rinse, repeat.

And that’s a shame, really, since the actual stories on
these side quests could be great with a bit more attention to setting. They’re
varied and fun, with everything from hostage negotiations to a droid that’s
gone round the twist. But they’re wasted on the identikit school of level
design.

The other major annoyance is the inventory system. First it
imposes a maximum 150-item limit, then it concludes that if you reach that you
have to discard items from the stuff
you’re picking up before it’ll let you in to the list of lower-level things
that you’d prefer to throw out. It’s infuriating, particularly as you don’t get
the option to “Well, I’ll put it down on the table here and pick it up when
I’ve cleared my backpack”. You either cram it into your inventory or you break
it down into “omni-gel”, some sort of magic goo that seems to work for
everything from repairing a carburettor to decrypting a computer lockout.

And that brings me to another thing. There’s a cute little
hacking minigame – “cute”, of course, until you’ve done it three or four times,
at which point it becomes a sort of mind-numbing frustration that you have to
indulge in because you’ll never get enough omni-gel to crack open the crates. The
problem is – showing a curious degree of laziness again, like the identical
interior locations – that the same minigame is used for everything. Hacking a computer? OK, run the hacking minigame. Found
a crashed probe? Hack into it to find, er, a medallion? Never mind. Found a BIG
LUMP OF SODDING ROCK that you want to survey? Get a hammer and chi... no, wait,
silly me. Run the hacking minigame. Obviously.

It all works, but the little niggles add up to a sort of
grating undertone of “this could be such a good game if” buzzing through your subconscious.

It’s such a shame, too, because I really do love this game.
The production design is great (I challenge anyone to not like the design of
the Normandy, for instance, though
the interior layout is clunky), the graphics are great if you’ve got the
computer for them, the story and acting and most of the controls are great...
So why did Bioware, of all people, let the game out with all those annoying
little bits? They can do so much better – we’ve seen them do so much better! – but instead they let the kernel of a
fantastic game out with rushed and irritating bits tacked on that do little but
drag the immersion and enjoyment down.

It’s rather like a Lamborghini with one of those dangling
tree things on the rear-view mirror, or a town square Christmas tree decorated
with bin bags and old shoes. Like Star
Wars with CGI, or a great bacon buttie that someone’s flung pickles into.

Oh, it’s still great. It’s just not quite as good as it
should have been.

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