Monday, June 9, 2008

More Mass Effect Impressions

Well, after a lot more time with the game, here's some updated impressions:

combat is getting really boring. It basically amounts to sitting behind cover and clicking on enemies until they are dead. If they get too close I might have to back up, smack them with my gun to knock them down, or use a tech/biotic power to destroy them before getting back to clicking on enemies from cover. There is absolutely no more depth than this.

the story missions kind of suck. I'm intentionally doing every side quest because I don't want to do the story missions. The story missions are consistently about excessive and long combat sequences and driving sequences. Over and over. For a long time. And occasionally there's NPCs to talk to and do a few small side quests in the middle of it. It's basically the same structure of KOTOR (which wasn't bad in that game) but because of the boring combat and driving, it just falls apart.

In fact, everything besides the conversation (which isn't much more advanced than KOTOR) is pretty dull. The inventory sucks too, I'm constantly reaching the 150-item maximum limit, which forces you to convert any NEW items you pick up into omni-gel. You get no choice in this as far as I can tell. So if you hit the item limit but you pick up some sweet items at the same time, and you want to convert some old useless items into omni-gel and save the new ones, you just can't. You can't (as far as I know) just 'not' take stuff from a storage locker; you have to take an item or convert it to omni-gel. The inventory list is awkward too. I hear it's an improvement over the one on the xbox, but if so I'd just hate to see how much worse it could be. There's basic categories by item type, but within those categories can be as many as 20 or 30 items just laying around. This is especially true in the weapon upgrade items, because I rarely go into that item category unless I'm actively upgrading a weapon, so there can be a hundred ammo types just sitting there that you'll rarely even see until you need to lighten your inventory.

Also, unlike KOTOR's vast assortment of weaponry, from vibroblades to lightsabers to stun batons to blaster pistols to disruptors to sonic blasters to bare hands, in Mass Effect there are literally just 4 weapons: pistol, rifle, shotgun, sniper. I don't know how Bioware could have taken such a large step backward in its game design compared to KOTOR, but Mass Effect feels like such an unpolished game it's sad. I really think the entire reason this game was praised so highly by major gaming press was that it plays like a slightly more complicated version of Gears of War, but with a storyline that copies KOTOR. Hence, the phrase that I like to use to describe Mass Effect:

GEARS OF KOTOR

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