Slurms’ ½ assed review of Mass Effect

Be advised, there will be end game spoilers from my experience after you get past the italics. But I will say this; if you haven’t played the first Mass Effect, I highly encourage you to. Regardless of the title “RPG” it tells a fantastic story and brings a new science fiction universe to life. One that I would gladly spend more time in regardless of the media by which is it presented.

So my marathon-like run of the first Mass Effect is complete. I knocked the game out in about 20 hours, knowing there were at least a few side quests that I skipped. I’m never much of a completionist in games. My wife even noticed that while I was playing New Super Mario Brothers Wii. She asked why I wasn’t getting all the coins. I told her because I didn’t “need” to, and she thought that it was odd to be playing a game and not trying to go 100% on it. It’s true with me though. I hardly ever complete a level or section of a game to its fullest. So it’s no big surprise that I rarely complete a game at all. But Mass Effect was one of those games that I just couldn’t put down. I had to complete it.

You may know from my last Mass Effect post that I was at a crossroads of losing one of my, and many others’, favorite companions, Wrex. I played the game nearly full Paragon, yet was missing the Charm option of the dialogue which would keep him from getting shot down. It turns out that all I had to do in order to get my extra dialogue was, embarrassingly enough; put more points into Charm (thanks Pazz!). From that moment in the game on, everything that had been building up in the story seemed to unfurl like a rose. Wrex would live, Ashle-er-Toiletface would die (no, I tried to save her I swear…), and Shepard would get it on with a hot blue alien. Oh yeah, there was also some things that happened at the Citadel with an alien invasion blah blah blah.

Seriously though, the ending was phenomenal, but I’ll say that I was a touch let down due to already knowing that Shepard lives and has a Captain Awesome moment where he reappears after he was thought to have died. Was a bit anticlimactic. But just the way everything worked out was stellar. From the huge ass battles with the Geth on Ilos, to the Mako meeting its demise after being used as a battering ram, then the “outer space” fights while watching the Citadel be attacked by Sovereign was some truly great action sequencing. Then even more so with the epic “reincarnated Saren” fight. One thing that impressed me was how part way through the firefight with him, they broke to the space battle to show what was going on, further increasing the tension that you had to kill this guy in order for everyone else to succeed.

If you listen to the podcast, you know that I’ve experienced a few bugs with the game; mostly with a lack of sounds during some of the cut scenes, and a couple of instances of bad AI. But those problems are quickly overlooked by the time you get to another part of the games story arc, and they will inevitably be thought back on nostalgically like you do many classic video games.

I have Mass Effect 2 loaded on my computer as of last night, and look forward anxiously to being able to fire it up. Like I said in my preface to this post, I am falling deeply in love with the mythos that BioWare has created with Mass Effect. I look forward to see what they do with the series, and have a huge hope that they one day allow me to live in this world by other means, whether that be via book, movie, or MMO. (hint hint BioWare)