We all have those games that we miss the first time around. With the busy release schedule of modern gaming, no one has time to play everything. That is why we at WingDamage present to you “Fashionably Late Reviews“. This is our series on games from the current generation of consoles that we may have missed on their initial release, but have gone back to experience now.

Bioware has a history of making very deep role playing games in a variety of settings. Ever since Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR), many fans have wanted to see what they could accomplish in a science fiction world of their own creation.

Mass Effect is the result. Here they have created their own sci-fi mythology, complete with political intrigue, cool alien races, space ships, and the imminent end of the universe.

You take on the roll of Commander Shepard, a human soldier. You can customize your gender and appearance and there are a few options to set up your character’s back-story. This will change some of the dialogue, but not the overall story. They cleverly get around the ability to give your character whatever first name you’d like by having all other characters refer to you as “Commander Shepard”.

You can also choose what type of combat to focus on. Physical combat makes you better with guns and able to take more damage. There’s also biotics and engineering, both of which give you special abilities that act in a similar way to the Force powers in KOTOR. You can do any combination of the three, but I found it easiest to focus Shepard on physical attacks and round out the party with at least one biotic or engineer sidekick.

There are a few areas where this game really shines, namely, the story and dialogue. Like other Bioware games, you can choose to be good or evil, or in this case, Paragon or Renegade. These choices will effect events later in the game and even which dialogue options become available to you. Near the end, there are major choices that will change the Mass Effect universe greatly moving forward.

The secondary characters and party members are well fleshed out. If you take the time to talk to them, you will learn a lot about them, why they have joined your fight, etc. There are even a few romantic interests possible. This aspect of the game was horribly over-hyped by the mass media and plays a much less significant roll in the game than most expected.

The main complaint for most players is the combat. Rather than the traditional turn based combat, Mass Effect is a combination of a third person action shooter and behind the scenes RPG stats. This makes the gun-play a little awkward at first. When you are starting out and are a low level, your shots will not be very accurate. Near the end of the game, when you are a high level, this works in your favor and auto-corrects your shots to an extent. You can also use the bumpers on the controller to freeze the action and bring up a menu where you use your special attacks, healing, etc.

Once you gain control of your own ship, you can choose to either continue on the main story line, investigate many of the side-quests on other worlds as they pop-up, or even just land on a random planet and drive around in the Mako. The Mako is an all-terrain vehicle that can be dropped from your ship to the surface of planets. Once on the surface, you control the Mako directly. It has a machine gun mounted on the top and a cannon you can fire by hitting the right bumper.

The controls of the Mako leave much to be desired. It likes to veer off in odd directions and try to flip over when going over bumpy terrain. Fortunately, there is no way to permanently flip the vehicle. The game also does not tell you about the cannon, which is the Mako’s most useful weapon. Many gamers I talked to did not discover it until very late in the game. If they keep this vehicle around for the sequel, I hope they tweak the controls… a lot.

I found the side-quests much too distracting on my first play through and decided to just finish the main story. Once you have completed the game, you can start a “new game plus” where you get to keep all your experience and equipment, but return to the start of the game. This is one of those few instances where I am excited to go back and play through a second time.

Bioware recently told fans to keep their Mass Effect save data, as it can be imported into the sequel and actually affect events in that game. I, for one, can’t wait to play it. Even with my minor gripes here, I can’t deny that I had a blast submersing myself in the ME universe.

Tags: Bioware, Fashionably Late Reviews, Mass Effect, rpg, Science Fiction, third person shooter, Xbox 360

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 21st, 2009 at 5:00 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.