Mass Effect – Review (1 and 2)
by Kireas on May.12, 2010, under Games
Part of The One Hundred Plus Game Review
I was assigned Mass Effect 2 to review about 4 months ago. As it stood, I hadn’t completed Mass Effect 1 either, so I figured I should just do both of the games and review them at the same time – to give me some perspective on the changes between the two. It took me up until last week to actually get into Mass Effect 1, and from there I pushed myself through both the games from start to finish. I’ve totalled almost 40 hours between the two games in the past 6 days, and needless to say, I’m pretty exhausted. But it was worth it.
I’ll begin by saying that Mass Effect is indeed an RPG, and while guns play a major part, I don’t consider it a shooter in any way. If I had to describe the series, I’d call it a movie where you tell the main character what to do rather than a game as such. If storytelling in a game doesn’t appeal to you, steer clear of the series, a 40 hour movie may drive you insane. For the rest of you, keep reading.
It’s extremely hard to keep spoilers from any sort of description of the game, but doing my best, I’ll say that the games have excellent stories. A major feature of the series is that you choose what your character does in the game, be they a Paragon, a shining example in the galaxy, or a Renegade, ready to do whatever it takes to get the job done. My Shepard (the set character – Commander Shepard) was a Paragon through and through, so my story was centred around her exemplary acts. In one scene, I had the option to horribly beat up someone tied to a chair to get the information I wanted – the game actually prompted me to do so 4 times through the scene. I resisted the urge. The ability to choose almost every reaction your avatar has to each situation is something I’ve only ever seen in Mass Effect, at least on such a large scale.
This ‘guidance’ of the story really immerses you, causing you to really think about your actions and to care for your squad and crew more than you would otherwise – unless you are playing the casual renegade, blowing up everything in your path. You probably don’t care about anything in that case.
The voice acting is incredible in almost all counts, as are the characters. The first game has everything down to a T, all the characters seem well fleshed out, even the little snippets of generated conversation you hear as you move around the world. In the second, there are two counts of miserable failure. Firstly, the DLC characters in Mass Effect 2 are…lifeless. Once their story mission is done, they retreat to two separate rooms on the ship, and cannot be properly interacted with as with the other potential members of your squad. Secondly, Male Shepard. I hadn’t heard his voice until I checked out some of the cutscenes on YouTube to compare – either I’m too used to my Shepard talking after 40 hours, or he just doesn’t have the same level of emotion as the female actor.
The second game does kill the level of immersion a bit by making every separate area actually separate. Mass Effect 1 had you travelling everywhere you went, with optional quick travel in the larger Citadel, and let you drive all over planets you could land on. You walked around your ship, taking the elevator between decks, and you boarded stations via the airlock. Mass Effect 2 does it all with loading screens. Changing ship decks? Elevator cutscene. Docking at a station? Docking cutscene. Travelling around the citadel? Actually no, because the citadel appears to have shrunken into three levels with one room up in the Presidium. With a cutscene to get there. I never thought I’d say this, but I want to be able to take 20 minutes walking to my next destination. It just feels cheap to cut out all the elevators and corridors – I even heard Garrus mention as such while I was at the Citadel in ME2.
I won’t mention much of the already heavily covered romancing in both games, but I went for Liara in ME1 (who doesn’t?), and Garrus in ME2 after I saw Liara again (my Shepard was put off). Although she really wanted Tali, BioWare didn’t see fit to allow this eventuality.
The role playing elements are far more apparent in the first game than the second. In ME1, you build up your character by allocating points per level to a choice of about 8 or 9 skills, and choose their weaponry by buying, finding and swapping out guns, armor and technology, comparing their stats, selling what you don’t need or reducing it to omni-gel. Typical RPG fare, but well tested, and well implemented. In ME2, you have a choice of 4 skills to start, upping it in my case to 6 by the end, all with only 4 levels in each skill unlike the 20 odd per skill in ME1. The weapons no longer have stats, but – with the exception of the heavy weapons – are primarily an aesthetic choice, which you choose before each mission. Weapons are batch upgraded via the Upgrades menu, requiring resources to do so.
Sorting out Tali's equipment in ME1
Ah yes, resource mining. In Mass Effect 2, to upgrade your weapons and armour, you have to get resources – you can’t just buy new kit, you have what you have (on the whole). The process of getting said resources in any large quantities is by going to a planet, waving your mouse over it for about 5 minutes, and shooting probes at it. It’s not a badly implemented system, but it is pretty tedious after a while. I’d rather be able to buy my upgrades again, like in the first game.
That’s not all the second game got wrong. I play my games on the PC, in case you readers didn’t grasp this. Mass Effect 1 and 2 are both console ports. However, Mass Effect 1 was ported by a third-party, and they did it very well, adding keyboard shortcuts to functions like the journal, extra graphical options, and making the game generally mouse friendly. Mass Effect 2 was ported by BioWare themselves. And they did it terribly. It’s like they saw the first games UI, and rather than building on it, decided to scrap it to make it more console friendly, and promptly ignored the PC gamers. There are no shortcuts to the journal, codex or such, quick save is gone, and bring back my goddamn radar. I don’t want to have to pause the game to see where the enemies are.
Edit 30/08/2010: Turns out the quick save still exists, but they moved it from F5 to F6 with no rebind option. Why? Probably because they can.
Mass Effect 2 also added an ammunition system to the guns – previously the guns just overheated and you had to wait for a cooldown, or change weapon. For Mass Effect 3, I’d suggest we go back to that. I rarely ran out of ammo for long enough for me to notice, which suggests that the ammo system is just a gimmick they inserted because they could. If I don’t notice the ammo system, why is it there? I didn’t notice the overheats much either, but at least I wasn’t forced to run around after ammo dumps!
In general, the UI of the first game, as well as how you interact with it as a player, is far superior than the second. And I hope they’ll review it in time for Mass Effect 3.
When you get down to it, however, the series is all about the story, and that is exemplary in both games. I’d strongly recommend Mass Effect 1 and 2 for anyone who likes a good yarn. To BioWare – remove ammo, bring back the elevators, more per world and not more worlds, and give the PC a bit more loving.
And steer away from the DLC’s.
Mass Effect 1:
Gameplay: 8/10
Immersion: 8/10
Storyline: 10/10
Re-playability: 10/10
Overall Score: 9/10
Mass Effect 2:
Gameplay: 7/10
Immersion: 7:10
Storyline: 10/10
Re-playability: 10/10
Overall Score: 8.5/10
Of Game Death
by Kireas on Mar.25, 2010, under Games, Musings
Recently, Valve killed TF2. They might not have noticed yet, but the most recent update of Team Fortress 2 sealed it’s fate for several communities and clans which I know – including a large portion of the community of which I am a part. They did it quite simply – they took something generally hated, the random drop system, and added some more weapons only obtainable via that system, as well as more completely pointless hats.
For me at least, this was the signal Valve had lost it, and I shut off TF2 until the Engineer update (where I hope for sweet heaven that they fix the drop system). As I do so enjoy my multiplayer games, I instantly latched onto Battlefield: Bad Company 2.
On the whole, BC2 is a solid multiplayer game, provided you have a squad full of team members. It is a good game, of this there is no doubt, barring the few niggling balance issues that DICE have promised to fix (the M60 soon, apparently). However, it has a very high skill ceiling, unlike TF2.
Let me explain. Team Fortress 2 clearly has excellent skill ceilings in the form of airshots, movement prediction, sticky carpets, and so on and so forth. However, most of these skills are tactical and not physical. Once you can aim, you can, in theory, learn the other skills, the most important of which is being able to work in a team. Because these skills are tactical, the physical skill ceilings for TF2 are actually very low. Take the Pyro. It might be my favourite class, but I’ll be the first to admit, it comes down to flaming everything that you can, and shotgunning or flaring the things you can’t flame. The reflects are one of the rare ‘skills’ in TF2, akin to aiming, but the Pyro can be played by anyone, and you’ll eventually kill anyone without too much difficulty. This is the same with all the TF2 classes – they are all very easy to pick up.
Bad Company 2 is different. Because of the lack of hit points, and the high weapon variations and damage outputs, physical skill in the form of aiming, jumping and movement in-game becomes an extreme indicator of how quickly you are going to die. This hasn’t been much of a problem up to now, as the game has been new; so players have been adapting. Now all the weapons are unlocked however, and people are settling into certain roles, players are beginning to pull rapidly away from public server skill levels.
This is great for competitive play. But it will make the game extremely newbie unfriendly. Counterstrike, anyone? And it’s already begun – I personally can’t aim for shit, when compared to the gamers I typically end up playing with. Yes, I’ll outshoot the majority of gamers, but this is just because I’m at the very bottom of the top. I’m good at games in comparison only to those who aren’t good. I’m terrible at games compared to almost anyone on my Steam Friends list.
Because of my personal lack of ability, BC2 is already dying for me – it can’t hold onto me when I die every 30 seconds. And it’ll be interesting to see if it manages to keep drawing new players to it when they join a server full of rank 40 players only to get fragged almost instantly.
In the end, it’s inevitable; TF2 held people by adding new content, and now it’s gone too far for the original playerset. Bad Company 2 will hold the hardcore players with its range of tactics and it’s high skill ceiling, but without fresh blood, all games die. But I can’t predict either of the games lifetimes, I can only say that every game dies for someone eventually. It’s just a matter of holding the majority.
EVE Online – Review
by Kireas on Feb.07, 2010, under Games
Part of the One Hundred Plus Game Review
EVE Online is a particularly tricky game to play compared to most MMO’s, largely due to it’s persistent nature. Many games claim persistance, but in a game where your actions don’t affect the game world for more than a few minutes at a time, those claims are so much garbage. In EVE, almost everything you do is permanent. And this can be unsettling.
EVE is a large scale MMO published by CCP Games – it has a large userbase, and one of the least whiny communities around. It has also made the news, at least here in the UK, a few times due to some big time scams done in game, stealing billions of the ingame currency, ISK (InterStellar Kredits). And its precisely this that draws people to the game; the chance to do something that actually affects others playing.
The new user experience has been reworked several times recently in order to try and give better and better feels for the game. Because of the player-driven nature of the game, the different ‘jobs’ avaliable are effectively limitless, you just have to find your niche. The tutorials keep this in mind, and offer starter missions from NPC’s to learn combat, more advanced variations thereof, industry revolving around manufacture and selling your goods, mining, exploration and business. I made do with combat, manufacture and mining when I started, but I went and had a look as a now-explorer at the new tutorials, and you can at least see how the game tries to explain itself to newbies. However, it can’t disguise one simple fact. EVE is hard.
Take my line of work in game. I’m an explorer, specialized in scanning, hacking, archaeological surveying and simple recon. For my corporation (a guild or clan in EVE), I typically scan down a signal inside the wormhole we live in, identify it, summon a few corp mates to help kill the sleepers (a nasty type of NPC that exists in wormholes) and then use my specialized skills to open up the loot canisters. And we sell the loot or use it to make cool stuff. But all this takes a very long time to figure out, new players don’t have much hope without aid.
It’s often said about EVE, the game doesn’t take off until you find a good corporation for yourself. As yet, I haven’t settled down – I may jump corp if something new comes up, but it’d have to be awesome, I’m a loyal person – but once you find one, EVE does have a lot of possibilities. It’s a giant sandbox.
Graphically, while pretty, you are just looking at ships and planets. Which gets dull. Incarna, the code-name for walking in stations, where you get to walk around outside your ship, isn’t out yet. Which is a shame, and puts lots of potential players off. Me too, actually. I want my /emote dance.
Combat is, like everything else in game, very technically minded. You have to outfit your ship very specifically, and know how to use each module you fit well, not to mention be trained in-game to use them, as well as increase the amount of CPU and capacitor energy your ship has…although when you actually get into combat, it’s more “turn everything on, see who dies first”. Which is a shame, given all the work that goes into planning the ship equipment, that it’s ultimately background noise.
I can’t really comment on the industry or market, as while EVE’s economy is incredible, and one of the most advanced economies in any game…I’m an explorer who sits around cloaked in wormholes. I don’t sell things, and I’m rarely even in systems with a station, let alone access to items and a market terminal. I’m told it’s awesome though. I’m also yet to reach the endgame, but with an absence of levels like in other MMO’s, it’s more because I’m terrified of the null-security space that surrounds hi-sec rather than my inability to access it. In most games, PvP’ers or player-killers are confined to certain places. In EVE, we like to refer to PvP’ers as ‘subscribers’. And if you lose your ship, you lose your ship.
And god help you if your clone wasn’t up to date.
I’m not going to give EVE a traditional score like the other reviews, as because of its open and unending nature, the game is still evolving, and I haven’t explored anywhere near a quarter of it, let alone finished it. I’d say it’s worth giving the trial a go, and seeing how it works out for you, but it’s complexity, and lack of instant rewards make it hard to get into for many. It’s a long term game, not a short term one.
Contact me on Steam or post questions in the comments for more information – it’s truly a hard game to pin down in a few paragraphs.
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