Saturday, July 25, 2015

Mass Effect

7.5/10

This is an other review from 2010 that was rotting on my harddrive.
MassEffect is a science-fiction single player RPG. Early in the game there was a lot of dialogs. It really is an RPG in the sense that you what your are going to say to NPCs is going to affect the outcome of your game. The voice acting is good for a video game. The game really starts after a few hours of gameplay when you finally get your ship.

Doing my first secondary objectives in open space at the beginning was very nostalgic. When you drop on an unknown planet, you explore it with a tank and it can take several minutes before you detect enemies. Then you engage in long range combat. Sometimes you find places to explore on foot or it is part of one of your secondary objective. These mechanics made me think of some older games where exploration was an important aspect of the game. However those secondary objectives are repetitive, the maps are always the sames and you get little action for your time.
The gap of quality between secondary objectives and main quests is huge. In the main quests you get a lot of action, cut-scenes and dialog and the maps are big and unique.

The interface for managing items is bad. The game floods you with items, you can get as much as 150 in a mission and when you get to sell them, you only get a huge unsorted list.

There are a few mini games, one of them you will need complete 10000 times if you plan to finish the game, every time you open a chest, hack a computer, a door, what-ever, even rocks, you will have to play. You need to have one of your character with the matching level of encryption to play so you might want to max this ability ASAP since there are loots requiring high level of encryption right at the beginning.

Combats are Ok. There is only one zoom on the sniper rifles. Sometimes your characters sticks himself to a wall when you don't want to. There is a delay when you use an ability or change weapon where you can't shoot. You can run in combat but when all enemies are down you can't run anymore :-S. WTF I have to walk all the way back!? Sometimes tried to tell my team mates to take cover near a door and I would need push them into place so that they were covered correctly.


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