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A trilogy that’s been on my list for a very long time. With the recent “Legendary Edition” out on Steam, I figured now is probably a good time to go and play them all.
I first set out to beat the original. While it sets up a few interesting ideas, I beat the whole game in just under 18 hours – including every sidequest I could find, an hour or two of idling, and a few unfortunate reloads when I accidentally skipped past a dialogue choice and had to reload from the start of a mission.
In truth, there are far more things that bothered me about Mass Effect than there were things I enjoyed. The main story is generic and all the side characters are simply in awe of how amazing you are (this is true across both chapters I played). The pacing is also quite suspect – the main mission line tells you to hurry, but there’s no timer or penalty for not rushing to the end. Originally I was going along with the urgency, only to realize I was at the last mission after I had “stolen my own ship” – at which point I spent the next few hours cleaning up all the sidequests I had collected while ignoring the “Time Sensitive End of the Galaxy” mission in my log.
Let’s also not forget how racist most of the characters are: in one mission of the first game, you’re forced to choose between condemning an alien race to extinction while letting one of your human companions shoot one of your alien companions (your responses are limited to the same level of annoyance as if they had taken your lunch out of the break room refrigerator) or using your mind-control-level persuasion powers (which you definitely already put points into, right?) to convince your alien companion that destroying a cure to their extinction problem is perfectly fine.
Mechanics-wise, the games go from bad to worse. The first game is rough around the edges (buggy AI teleporting in and out of cover or walking in circles, teammates stepping in front of you constantly), but is still serviceable enough for a Bioware game. By the second game, however, combat is devolved into the most bog-standard cover-based shooter with ammunition management imaginable. Not to mention that the physics and practicality of thermal clips (and Bioware’s explanations) almost anger me.
Exploration mechanics are improved in the second game (the first didn’t even track what you’d already explored), but introduce even more tedious minigames. Driving on planets in the first game was an interesting experiment, but you know how in Skyrim you climb up mountains by just mashing the jump key until you find the right polygon? Mass Effect basically expects you to do this in your practically indestructible, impossible to control ground rover – usually to find one more piece to one of those half dozen collectible quests in your log. The second game discards these mechanics (seemingly entirely) for more set piece-based planetary environments, albeit with a far more entertaining rover – swapping a failed experiment for an incredibly boring one.
Mods do fix a couple of the issues I had – for example, your main character gets winded running more than about 10-15 meters. This may make sense in standard cover-based shooters, since your character is ostensibly carrying body armor, many weapons, ammo, and more. Here, you can be dressed in casual clothing or a skin-tight bodysuit and still have the same amount of stamina as a sloth. Sprinting isn’t even much of an advantage – it just lets you get from one side of the unreasonably large room to the other – so an infinite sprinting mod is almost essential (as well as one to remove the nausea-inducing screen shake from the second game). Other than that, the only big mod I used was one to remove the mini games. While they’re fun the first dozen times, just bypassing them takes practically nothing away from the game and no longer interrupts the flow of combat or narrative. The last mod I would consider essential was one to safely skip conversations without selecting a dialogue option – since the same key is used for sprinting, getting in and out of cover (a problem of its own), skipping dialogue, and choosing dialogue.
It’s at this point I realize that I’ve not really had anything positive to say at all. Sadly, this is probably accurate. There are brief moments of fun, a couple interesting companions, and an occasional good idea, but nothing that is worth the utter tedium that is Mass Effect. Tier Three for the first two games, which is as far as I got. Play Shadowrun or Pathfinder: Kingmaker (or Star Citizen, for that matter) instead.