Mass Effect (PC) Review
Often when a developer releases a game, they want the first thing you say when you start playing to be simple “wow.” They want you to be wowed with the scope, with the music, with the graphics… they just want your first impression to be “wow.” The problem is that you have MANY developers looking to one-up each other at this. So what’s “wow” today is likely going to be “normal” or “meh” the next day. However, in Mass Effect, I think we have a title here that will remain “wow” for a long time.
Mass Effect follows the adventures of Commander Shepard, who through the events within the game, becomes the single most important person in the galaxy and the struggle for the survival of all intelligent life within it. Right off the bat, you will find out Shepard has been nominated to be the galaxy’s first human specter (in case you do not know, specters are agents who do the dirty work for galactic civilization as a whole, but do so outside the law), and your first mission in the game is a test to see if he has what it takes. This also quickly becomes the perfect vehicle to introduce the main antagonist of the game that you will spend the rest of the main missions chasing after.
And missions are exactly how to describe this game. You will travel to various locations and complete missions recorded in your journal by people and things you see/hear/talk to as you see fit and completing the main ones whenever you want to move the core story along. While the game is exceedingly short for an RPG, (my little brother completed the Xbox 360 version of this game in roughly 8 hours), the game offers an insane amount of events going on throughout the galaxy both triggering more of these missions and triggered by your actions during and between them, giving you the impression of a full and busy galaxy. This is why this game continues to be one with a “wow” effect. Add to this the codex entries you will receive explaining the deep, rich, and very complete history and current events of the galaxy, and you will see one of the most complete worlds made for any video game to date. Bioware REALLY made a masterpiece in the worlds you get to play with.
And play you will. The game mechanics are for the most part exceedingly smooth, from conversation to combat, feeling almost completely natural in it’s new home on a keyboard and mouse. I say almost due to the fact that holding down spacebar to open a combat menu mid-combat is not as natural as it could have been. (Just hitting space would have been better.) This is really trivial, however, since the game pauses while you do this, allowing you to breath and think about what you are doing and making even a small amount of awkwardness forgiveable.
However, also worth pointing out is an issue with the cover system: you can get stuck on walls, much like the complaints I have heard personally about Gears of War (regardless of version). Overall, it works rather nicely, but but considering I can speak from experience where the very last boss of the game almost killed me because I got too close to debris I was backing up around and got stuck on it, I would say it is shy of perfect and could probably have used a little bit of work.
Technically, I wish I could be as impressed with this game as I am with the world and overall gameplay. Make no mistake, this game is a port from the 360, and it shows. EVERY issue I had on a technical level seems to stem from this, and settles into exactly 3 issues:
The first, most common, and most trivial issue is graphical pop-in. Almost every time when you first get into a level, you notice the details of the area are VERY low… and the high detail pops in a second later. This is a direct result of the game being a port from the 360. On the console, the idea was to reduce loading times since the game had to load from a disc, letting you get going while the game finished loading. The problem here is, we are on a PC. We are not loading from a CD or DVD. We are loading from a much faster hard drive. It would have been no issue to wait an additional half-second and see everything the instant the game starts the map, not a moment later.
The second issue is not quite as common, but a little more of an annoyance…. awkward loading. This seems to come from bringing the RAM limitations of the 360 home, without whatever extra code the 360 had to handle this in the background (I honestly suspect relying on the 3 cores of the 360 CPU was a big part of this, where PCs at the time were still balancing around a single core processor). The results are that randomly the game will drop frame-rate while your hard drive clicks away to load a new chunk of data, sometimes pausing entirely with a “Loading” screen. This was completely unnecessary on the PC, though, just due to the RAM available to the PC gamer. (PC required a Gig of RAM and no card with less then 128 MB of RAM on it’s own, more then doubling the what the 360 has.) They could have easily taken advantage of that, and with a little work, adjusted the on the fly loading to not be so obtrusive. Still, this never annoys for more then a few seconds, and NEVER happened in the heat of the action, so this is a forgivable, if annoying oversight in the porting process.
The third oversight is with sound. Simply put, this game uses accelerated sound by default…. and it sounds nice… in theory. However, it seemed to me it was set for 5.1 surround sound only, which means anyone using this with stereo speakers (like most PC gamers that Im aware of) literally can not hear the speech or sound effects almost at all over the background noises without turning this feature off. First lesson of game developement is to make sure your game runs right in the most common configuration, making this a blatant failure in the process.
Further pressing matters are bugs in the non-accelerated version of the sound. I can not speak for these being in the accelerated or not since I could not use it, but the code running the software version is terrible. If too much is going on that it has to keep track of, it starts to loose sources and stutter the background music/effect. The results are dropped conversations, gunshots, footsteps, and even in two of the bars in the game, the dance music getting stuck repeating the first few notes like a broken MP3. Needless to say, this is VERY annoying, and leaves you thankful that it seems to only be an issue in 3 very specific areas in the game, one of which it goes away as you kill the army of enemies. Keep in mind, this was NOT a slowdown, as the game at all 3 points didn’t drop a frame from the FPS… this was purely a sound issue.
Overall, though, this game is incredible. You are given a huge galaxy with an insane amount of detail which still reacts to your choices very well. The main game is short, but as a plus, this also means there are very few missions you actually must do, leaving you to be free to do pretty much anything you want, or not do anything you don’t want. The choice is yours, which seems to be the core idea Bioware was going for when they made this one. VERY well done!
User Score:
1 vote
1 vote
Related posts:
- Mass Effect 2 : Collector’s Edition announced Another day another reasons for Keats to be broke! Man...
- Mass Effect 3 already in the works Bioware are some of the busiest devs on the planet...
- Mass Effect 2 : PC Specs revealed And DRM raises it’s head again… I am sure everyone...
- Mass Effect 3 Confirmed With Possible 2011 Release A third Mass Effect 2 was already confirmed, but according...
- Mass Effect 2 sells 2 million units And the game was only out Tuesday! EA blasted out...
News
