Hey, guess what? I’m finally playing Mass Effect. Yes yes, I know I’m late to the party. But I figured it was about time I learned for myself what all the fuss was about. Right now I’m about seven hours in, so it seems like a good time to stop and gather my thoughts.
The last Bioware game I played was Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. People loved that game, but not me. Back in 2006 I played it for about a dozen hours before finally giving up in frustration. I thought it had an okay story but it was slow and I couldn’t get past the shitty technical problems. So you can’t call me a Bioware fan.
Well now I’m onto Mass Effect because for $20 for a new copy, why not? And hey, this game has some of the same shitty technical problems like Knights of the Old Republic, but at least there’s less of them. However I can’t stand riding fucking elevators every fucking place I go. They’re so goddamn slow! I’d much rather see a brief loading screen than have a long elevator ride that forces me to listen to some boring news report. It’s really frustrating and it seriously slows down the game.
Even if the elevators weren’t in the game, Mass Effect would still move very slowly. After seven hours I feel like I haven’t accomplished much at all. It’s like all I’m doing is moving from one poorly-designed location to another, trying to navigate confusing layouts while using a barely-functional mini-map, and talk-talk-talking to people about things I couldn’t care less about. But at least there’s shooting, right? Wrong.
Combat is another technical problem. Whether you’re on foot or in your big six-wheeled land-rover thingy, combat sucks. It’s not fun. I just want to shoot dudes and get it over with. There’s a radial menu of special abilities that I try to ignore as much as possible. I don’t care about that stuff and I don’t want to bother with it. I’m playing on the Casual difficulty setting and I have the game set to auto-assign experience points to my party members. I’m only interested in Mass Effect’s story and I have zero interest in micro-managing skills points. That kind of stuff does nothing for me.
At this point you’re probably thinking to yourself “Gee, he must really dislike this game.” Well, you’d be half-right. I dislike a lot of it, but I find the characters, dialogue and story compelling enough to keep playing. Sure, I find a good deal of what the side characters have to say to be pointless and boring, but the major characters are pretty interesting. I really like the main character, Commander Shepard (my Shepard is a tough-talkin’ soldier lady). And I really like most of my ship’s crew. It’s obvious a lot of thought went into creating these characters and to try making them into believable personalities. They’re all pretty neat.
So I’m going to continue trudging along, exploring the galaxy and visiting mostly-bland new worlds. As long as I get to keep talking to interesting people, make some compelling moral choices and eventually bang a hot alien lady, things should be A-OK. Expect to read more whining as I continue my adventure!
