In case you aren’t aware, the title for this review is from the book by Albert Camus. Camus wrote a lot of things as a writer, but if you took everything he wrote it wouldn’t have as many words in all his things than all the words in Mass Effect, because Mass Effect has too many words and horrible gameplay and everything else that could be bad. Reading a book by Camus is also more fun than playing this.
At the beginning of the start of Mass Effect you get to make yon characters. However, you only make one and you can’t really make them fun at all. You can choose between a couple things like whether you’re the hero man or if all your friends died, but not many choices exist at all. You can only choose a few option and you can’t even write your last name. The whole game is based on this idea that you get to choose to do things, but they don’t let you choose who you want to be at all at all.
You can also design how your person man looks, but only the face, and only from a couple of choices you put together. Why can you not do more? Why not change how the rest of him looks? Why not let you actually control the character making things instead of just having to choose between nothing and also nothing good? It’s because Bioware was lazy and only wanted to make this game lame. That’s why so much of it is unoriginal and bad.
There’s a story, but it’’s basically Star Wars and Halo thrown into a Blendtec total blender ™ and made into this horrible existence. You get these alien counsils and the aliens who are sometimes bad, and even sometimes other ripoffs. Of course, those things weren’t as much text involving. For every time you want to learn of the game you have to hear some monologues and people rant and talk for a long time about nothing while repeating themselves a lot as they talk about nothing. There are long cutscenes and a ton of more text and choices you can make to give you more text. They have voice acting also which makes it take even a lot longer since people pause and then wait a while while still talking so everything takes too long to hear. Everyone in this game is American also, since nobody has a foregin accent even if they’re from all of Earth. Why not have some Australians or stereotypical French people who walk around with cigarettes and white flags and socialized medicine? So many things would have made the game better.
There are a lot of these other aliens of course, but the good ones still look like the people. They have arms and legs each of two and the only difference is their faces look like zebras. Other aliens are the same way, with too many of them being just like humans and speaking English. How do they speak English or even have yon vocal cords that are the same? Why do all the aliens breathe the same and why do all the planets have oxygen and water? Shouldn’t planets be different? Again, they should, but aren’t because Bioware was lazy and thought to not make the game fun but instead lame.
Also involved in that are the choices idea. You can choose how you talk to people, but it’s basically a choice of more text or also more text, none of the effects make much of a difference. There are only two endings for all your choices, which is lame. Nothing makes a difference except which too much text you have to hear. All you can hear is the dialogue anyway; there’s no music because again Bioware was lazy. I ended up having to listen to Five to One and 16 Military Wives and Digital Love and Holiday in Kampuchea or whatever it’s now called and other songs by artists whose names begin with a D.Why not have fun music in this game?
But what about gameplay? The game is kind of like the shooters and the Western RPGs at the same time, but neither are original at all. The WRPGs parts are like Oblivion but now in space which is like Mario Galaxy and nothing at all is new or remotely fun because there’s too much talking and many words. When you walk around though you get to carry a gun, but only four or so. You aim at evil things like you do in Gears of the Wars while taking cover, but they aren’t even good like Gears by giving you a button to let you do things.
The guns are really lame as well. You don’t have to reload because you have a brick instead of bullets or something weird, and you don’t need to worry about ammo becausse it’s space? That makes no sense at all, yet that’s how this game pretends things are. You also have to do a lot with them and other things anyway. Everytime you pick things up or level up or do anything else the game basically tells you to “Go to that menu a lot.” So you go there, and there’s a ton of horrible menus in the menu and it’s hard to navigate because there’s too much text. Again. Wow.
For the game, you’re mainly doing the same things all the time, even though sometimes you might be in a car which is hard to move. You keep having to get missions which are almost all the same since all the planets are the same. Really. All the “unexplored super secret planets of secrets” are about a hectare (I think it’s a hectare, I’m not always as sure about how metric is used because I’m American and we don’t use the metric system) and the others all have the same type of bunkers and other things. It’s not realistic at all. In our solar system of eight planets, there’s a not planet which is small and frozen, gas planets, the good planet with oceans, moons that are other atmospheres, etc. Why is it that everywhere else the every planet is the same? It just breaks the idea of it being real at all.
There’s a lot of stuff that isn’t real at all, in fact. Your shepherd man since you can’t rename him can disarm bombs by looking at them from a while away, he can’t jump, he can crack safes with jello, and there’s no mulitplayer at all. You can’t have fun doing co-op or Capture those flags or anything else that would be maybe fun.Why? This is on the 360, the console with the good online. Every game should have it, why doesn’t it?
Bioware was way too lazy with this game. If they had spent time to make its story original, its gameplay fun, it have music, or something else instead of just writing dialogue all the time this game could have been fun. Instead it’s a lame repetitive and ripoff game which isn’t a good WRPG or shooter. Instead of this game, buy a better one.
Posted by massany7 