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Mass Effect (Xbox 360)

By: DriverHeaven Dec 04, 2007

Commander Shephard

Selecting your past isn’t the only thing you have control over when creating your avatar for Mass Effect. When compared to other RPGs the only limitation you will come across is that you can only create a human character. That is it however – the looks of your character are entirely up to you. Cue in the female choir RPG fans, your dreams have come true! Commander Shephard (you can select the first name, but all will call you either by your last name or station and rank) will look exactly like you want him/her to, right down to the skin wrinkles and war scars, not to mention eye shape, nose size and other major facial features. Once you are finally happy with how your character looks it is time to make perhaps the most game influencing choice – you have to select your class.

Instead of being presented with dozens of different classes that end up playing exactly the same, Mass Effect only offers you 3 base classes and 3 hybrid ones. The three base classes are all pretty standard fare in terms of names and features: The soldier is your run of the mill gun wielding, front row charging killing machine that pays little attention to himself. Almost a complete opposite, the engineer tends to stay behind cover and assist his colleagues by healing them and causing various degrees of mischief amongst enemy lines by disabling their shields and jamming their weapons. Last but not least comes the adept, Mass Effect’s version of a force user from Knights of the Old Republic. Relying only on a pistol these guys tend to throw enemies into the air for easy pickings or simply smashing them against a wall for massive damage. On paper these classes sound noticeably different, but they usually do. But while practice usually tells us otherwise, Mass Effects throws away with convention and actually plays out completely differently based on your class choice. Even the hybrid classes, a mix of two base classes have enough going for themselves that you can actually replay the game 3 times before you’ll start coming across gameplay segments that you have already experienced.

Let’s take a look at a common combat encounter. You and two other team members (each belonging to a different class type) enter a room full of space pirates whose only goal it is to add another tick on their giant black flag, hanging proudly from the mast of their spaceship (well, I’m taking it a bit far here, so suffice it to say they want you dead). A soldier’s approach would be to duck for cover, grab his high speed rifle and then jump out of cover, take a few shots at exposed enemies and then go to cover again. Then, after the enemy is worn out a bit from incoming fire (and bionic/tech abilities depending on your choice of companions) the soldier will ordinarily put away his rifle, grab a shotgun and go right into the midst of his foes to finish the job. Quick, effective and to the point. But also completely reckless! An engineer would, like the soldier, first find cover, but after that go with a completely different strategy.

After boosting his shields to prevent any unneeded trouble he’ll use some of his abilities to completely incapacitate the enemies, then raise his head out of cover, take a few easy shots with his pistol and duck once again. For his next wave he’ll use another set of abilities, or perhaps detonate some barrels next to his enemies (an easy feat since he is safely out of range). What about the adept? He’ll most likely combine the two approaches – after assessing the situation he’ll probably throw the nearest group of enemies halfway across the room and then lift the remaining enemies into the air, where his team will easily deal with them. Now, just as the first group is getting back on their feet the adept will put one of them into stasis and have his team deal with the rest, leaving the frozen foe for last. The hybrid classes will obviously use a mixture of the above tactics, but usually combined in a unique enough manner that they don’t feel like cheap combinations of the base approaches.

You probably know by now that the combat in Mass Effect closely resembles the duck and cover system Gears of Wars uses. Experienced from a third person view, players will try to stay out of line of sights most of the time, since except for the soldier based classes (and even then not all) health has a nasty habit of dropping extremely fast when under fire. Quite often the battles will play out like exact clones of encounters from GoW, with you and your team pressed against walls and barricades, trading shots with enemies who are doing much the same. To my biggest surprise, enemies will often leave their cover and start coming straight for you. I am not sure if this is due to some advanced AI who just knows I’m low on shields and health and can’t survive a direct firefight or due to the lack of any kind of AI, but whatever the reason is, it makes combat quite dynamic. And well it should, since otherwise the combat wouldn’t be much fun.

You see, despite being fairly polished , the combat still feels vastly inferior to what GoW threw at us. It’s hard to put into words, but the moment you will take your first shot it will be clear as day that this game is an RPG first, shooter second. Don’t get me wrong, even on its own the shooting portions of the game make a solid experience, but you’d probably skim right over it. Some of this is because of glaring bugs in the combat system – you, your team mates and enemies alike will often get stuck on geometry or, even worse, outside of the game world. It doesn’t happen too often to make you hate the game, but unfortunately often enough for you to resent the game at least a bit. Even more so because of the sadistic save system. We have all grown used to the fact that in Bioware games you can’t save in the middle of combat. But when the auto-save feature tends to its job only every few hours and you stumble upon a hard fight without any warning, resulting in losing a good hour or so of playing… well, you’re going to hate the game at least for a while.