Kireatic

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

Part of the One Hundred Plus Games Review.

BioShock. Said to be one of the best games of recent times, but wasn’t a game I had ever actually played, despite it’s high rating among most gamers. So, when I was gifted a copy, it gave me the chance to have some proper quality time with the game.

What I discovered may well shock some of you. BioShock is…okay.

I’ll quickly back-pedal by saying that the storyline is one of the best I’ve ever seen in a game, and has the most stunning plot-twist since when that platform went round the corner in Portal and I saw a fire pit. Would you kindly…? The little sisters, and the journal entries scattered about the game slowly increase the back story, until every new piece of Rapture makes you think “Ah, this is what such-and-such was talking about…”. It’s masterfully done, and really helps you feel immersed in a game, something that doesn’t happen every day. You even have the choice of harvesting or saving the little sisters each time, which in essence is a form of good or evil. A man chooses, a slave obeys…

Graphics are on the whole pretty good, with plenty of detail in the scenery, and water acts like it should when it’s part of said scenery, which is nice. It doesn’t interact with objects otherwise, other than to obscure your view, which is a shame, but understandable given the tremendous increase in power that is required from the engine and the computer to do that. PhysX would be nice in BioShock 2 for that, but I digress. My biggest complaint on the graphics would be on the enemies and people you see around the place. Unless in a cut-scene, their mouths don’t move when they talk. That really annoyed me. How are they talking when their mouths aren’t moving! A real shame, but there you go. Some variation in the little sisters other than dress and hair colour would be appreciated as well.

Gameplay is where the game actually suffers. There is a tremendous amount of customization that you can do, swapping out how your plasmids work, how much damage you take, how fast you move, even how objects in the game react to you, which is fantastic. But that all comes to nothing once you realize that the lighting plasmid and the wrench is all you need. I killed the final boss with the lightning plasmid and the wrench. I’m sorry, 2k, but giving the player everything they need at the start, while technically sound, is boring. I had over 700 Adam before I took on the last boss purely because I didn’t want to spend it on any abilities that I wasn’t going to use. Although let it not be said whacking everything with your wrench isn’t fun, and you can always vary it if you like at your whims, it’s just a shame that you are never actually forced to change weapons unless taking on a Big Daddy – and even then it’s not required to do so.
Other than the whole zap and smack issue, the game plays rather well, and is never too slow a pace with once exception, near the end – trying not to spoil it, but the escort segment is extremely slow and agonizing. But other than that, no complaints. The game took me 10 hours to complete, 6.6 hours of which were in a row, so it has holding power at the very least.

The UI is good, easy to read and the game is easy to control. Default plasmids using the F-keys is a bit annoying, as those keys are just out of reach during normal gameplay, and I don’t like having to move my hand away from the WASD keys to quick-change to a plasmid, so I was mostly using the mouse and scroll – less speedy, but easier. I’d recommend re-binding that particular setup, but otherwise worked great.

BioShock gets:

Gameplay: 7/10
Graphics: 9/10
Difficulty: 8/10
Storyline: 10/10

Overall Score: 8.5/10! Hoping that BioShock 2 fixes the gameplay aspects, and then we’ll be away!

Red Faction – the original one, I mean. A classic game, if not a tad dated at this stage in computer gaming, being released in 2001. I have the great honour of owning all the Red Faction games, but have never in fact played any of them. As part of my One Hundred Plus Review, I played through the original Red Faction with an eye to review the game by both today’s standards and those of games of almost a decade ago.

My first experience of Red Faction was actually when it first came out on a friend’s Playstation. I never played the single player, but much fun was had in the multiplayer mode, running around, getting cheap kills with the rail gun and digging a hole in the wall. So, when I first started up the game, it brought back many fond memories, and reminded me of what I love most about the game; the destructible environments.

Games which let you blow holes in anything you feel like are rare, even today, so being able to just blast your own personal tunnel into a wall is great fun, if not a waste of explosives. More games need this mechanic rather than the RF series, in my view. However, RF1 falls down insofar that it relies too much on destruction to see you through the game. If you get caught needing to get into a room with explosives, but you have none left, you either have to reload an old save or, the horror, cheat to continue. It’s a nice idea, but if you are going to make it a necessity, have some form of unlimited destruction, not just a 5-clip rocket launcher, some C4 and a few grenades. Because they run out.

A side effect of the destruction is that there are a ton of hidden passages to be uncovered, making the game feel a lot less linear than it really is, without being confusing – something games being released now could probably learn a lot from. That and I always have liked bursting out through a wall on top of some surprised guards. Makes my day.

The gameplay itself remains good by most standards. There’s a steady difficulty curve, and both combat and stealth sections. The stealth works well for the most part, except when discovered. There’s then about a minute of frantic shooting until your silenced pistol runs out of ammo, and then hiding hoping nobody will shoot you until the alarm goes away. The alarm buttons on the wall, by the way, are apparently for the NPC’s to press, and for you to stop them pressing. Don’t press them yourself. They set the alarm off. Call me an idiot, but I didn’t realize that would happen the first time. The NPC’s are also well programmed, reacting on sight to your intrusion and not being all-knowing through walls that some games suffered back in 2001 (and some still do). The voice acting is great as well, but the first guard who said “Don’t shoot! I’m unarmed”, I believed, so I put my gun away. Bastard hits me. I shoot his head off, and proceed to kill everyone I come across for the rest of the game, just in case.

The story is…good. It makes sense, for the most part, although it’s hardly ‘gripping’. Not much more I can say about that, except for wondering why Parker takes orders from Eos so…readily.

The option to melee with your weaponry would have been nice, especially at the start of the game when you just have the pistol. What’s wrong with smacking someone with the butt of your weapon, huh? And why the hell does the riot shield vanish after one shove? Seriously, that’s just a bit odd.

The various environments of play are also great fun, with the exception of shallow water, which behaves oddly and really slows you down. On the topic of bugs, there are a few of them, the most notable one being the giant robot in the trash refinery. First time round, he got stuck. And the second. And the third. And the tenth. So I went and looked up what exactly I was supposed to be doing - apparently I was doing it right, the robot just does that. In the end I was forced to turn godmode on and jump into the robot to shove him into the tunnel before carrying on. I suspect you could have used rockets or something to widen the tunnel, but regrettably, I had used all the rockets in the area trying to kill the robot. Boo-hoo. This is why you have more than one save, people.

Checkpoints would be nice as well. If you don’t save, you are screwed – it actually just restarts the game for you. I lost 20 mins because I assumed that “Loading…” also meant saving, but apparently that mentality hadn’t caught on back in 2001. It’s been a while since I frantically saved after every bad guy, but there you go.

On a graphical note, very impressive for 2001, although the weapons UI starts out as being a little difficult to use compared to the modern day equivalents, and a tad clunky. Reminds me of HL1′s UI, but better looking and less obvious.

Oh, and I love the soundtrack.

So, Red Faction I, I give you:

Gameplay: 8/10
Graphics: 9/10
Difficulty: 7/10
Storyline: 8/10

Overall Score: 8/10! Not bad for a game that’s 9 years old.