Mass Effect (PC)

Talking head drama among the stars.
6/5/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 2

Once you and your team are on foot and in a fight, things are more like a first-person shooter, albeit one that is driven by role-playing game-like statistics. Your aim and your abilities are all defined by the level of your character, and you level up frequently. Shooter veterans will find the default difficulty relatively easy. The game employs a decent cover system, and it's easy to see what objects are useful for obstruction between you and an enemy.

Guns are unimaginative slug throwers in the assault rifle, pistol, shotgun and sniper rifle mold. You won't care whether you're firing an Edge pistol or a Scimitar shotgun as long as it's got the highest number behind the name. Weapons are just a tool to get you through combat while biotic powers are a little more interesting. These allow you to briefly disable electronic foes, send others flying with a kinetic throw, or bring team members back from the brink of death. Though later confrontations are more exciting, a lot of the default difficulty combat is rather lame. You find cover, keep your team and yourself alive, aim and shoot! Babysitting your artificial intelligence partners during the fights is usually necessary, but if you outfit them well, they occasionally come in handy, and having them around makes the game seem like a less solitary experience.

Mouse and keyboard controls in this PC version are far superior to the controls in the Xbox 360 version, especially for menu interaction. The hacking mini-game is completely different while remaining super-simplistic. Also, some of the same bugs that were in the 360 version appear in this one, and your inventory is still limited, so if you're not careful, you'll end up losing a pile of items because you can't carry any more until you toss some of the ones you have. Managing this inventory is easier with the mouse, but it still takes too much time to do and interrupts the flow of play.

That's the bottom line for the entire game. By juxtaposing all these genre types in one massive game, BioWare has created something that never quite becomes the sum of all its disparate gameplay parts. There just isn't any kind of flow for you to ever get ahold of and ride out that wave of entertainment all the way to the end. It didn't help that I ran into some common audio stuttering problems that would occasionally cause me to miss bits of the dialogue. Despite these issues, I did want to see how it all turned out for Shepard, and a lot of other folks will probably want to find that out, too.

This review is based on a retail copy of the game downloaded from the EA Store.