I never knew weak combat can screw a game over so badly.

User Rating: 7.5 | Mass Effect X360
By smiggles116 | Review Date:
Long before this game announcement, I spent countless hours playing Bioware's Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. That game was amazing. The story was perfect, the voice acting was unbelievably good, and the combat was incredibly flawed. Your ability to enjoy the game was based on this notion: if you cannot accept the action, you will not like the game. However, KOTOR did not focus on combat, but more so on everything else. Mass Effect is like a spiritual successor to KOTOR in ever way. You got great voice acting, a great story, fantastic art design. It seems like the game is perfect when you first start playing. However, once you are thrown into the combat, everything just starts to fall apart. The aiming is horrid. Teammate A.I. sucks worse than you have ever seen. The graphical slowdown makes you feel as if you are watching a slide show. Sniping has to be the most frustrating exercise I ever experienced in a video game. To top it all off, the game use some weird RPG-style combat engine (with hidden dice-rolls and lots of math) that KOTOR used. Oh sure, it worked in KOTOR, but that game's combat engine was a bizarre mix of real-time and turn based combat (and somehow, worked). Mass Effect's combat is real time. Sometimes the player winds up getting screwed when a dice rolls in the favor of the enemy, causing you to die and wait for a full minute to respawn. To make matters worse, (or better) Bioware has included in Mass Effect the dumbest thing ever seen in a game: a jumping car. That stupid car, or Mako (it sucks to much to call it by it's name), just sucks. The handling will remind you of what it was like when you tried to drive home drunk from a party (which is horrible. If you did that, SHAME ON YOU. Go get a life and stop believing that getting drunk is cool. Do something else that will benefit you and others). The car has a few more issues that will infuriate you. The gun is located on top of the vehicle, and its lowest aim is at level with the car. This might not seem like a bad thing, but when you consider that the car sits 8 feet off the ground, you might start punching stuff ( I did this, and I advise you not to punch anything that will punch back). To be honest, I first thought that the jumping car was funny, but after I started shooting stuff, my punching spree began.

It is really a shame. The rest of the game is phenomenal. The story is filled with twist, emotion, and enough side quest to fill your weekends with nothing but pixels and conversation menus. The voice acting is just as good as a Pixar film's would be. The graphics do have noticeable loading problems and framerate issues during combat, but whenever you are just standing around, the environments and character models look amazing. Watching the main character run around in circles was simply astounding. THAT GUY LOOKS TOO REAL!!! It is a bit scary at first. My brother had to be committed to a psychiatric institute. I kid you not. His brain couldn't handle the shock. It almost exploded! Thank the good Lord that he didn't wind up like my friend. His head didn't explode. His whole body burst into pieces! There was blood everywhere! It was awesome!. . . . . . . . . I really got off topic there. Where was I? Oh yes, the positive points of Mass Effect. There is no denying the best part of Mass Effect: the ability to choose your path. While KOTOR won a gold medal in that area, Mass Effect wins a billion dollars, a super model, a condo, a chimp with the ability to kill snails with mind bullets (I want one), and yes, a gold medal (the one KOTOR had). The conversation options are unprecedented and as natural as they can be. There was one little change in conversation options between Mass Effect and previous Bioware games. Whenever you choose a conversation option, the option will say something like "my butt hurts" (this is just an example), but when you select it, your character will say something like, "hey guys, that sniper shot in the @$$ really stings". Its as if you are not choosing your characters dialoge, but his or hers thoughts. This is kind of a good thing. For example, there was this one time in the game when this guy was supposed to tell me something important, but he just babbled around. I got agitated, and there was a option to say " Just shut up and tell me what happened already". I selected that option. I knew that I would upset the guy and he would refuse to tell me I wanted to know because of my attitude, but I didn't care. Apparently, my character knew this to, but unlike me, he did care. Instead of saying the rude statement shown in the text, he said it politely, but you could tell that he (the main character) was getting agitated with the man. It was cool. It was human.

Mass Effect is fun. The game is incredibly deep and enjoyable, just as long as you are not shooting stuff. Hopefully the next game will address, or eliminate, the combat problems and create a more accessible game when Mass Effect 2 rolls around. Only time will tell.

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