However, your second play-through won’t end much differently than your first, because the power of your choices over the story is somewhat limited by one inevitable outcome. While you have ample opportunity to treat people like dirt (some of which can result in the deaths of major characters and team members) and exhibit some unfriendly human-supremacist views, the big picture is unaffected by your actions - in other words, you can’t truly turn evil. That’s kind of disappointing, because the impact of having to make a choice is greatly reduced if it doesn’t really make a difference in the grand scheme of things.
Looting is streamlined - your vanquished enemies drop items directly into your inventory, eliminating the need to individually search corpse pockets in the aftermath of every battle. This speeds up the pace of play, though it does break the immersion a little. How did I get a gun from a guy I sniped 100 yards away? Which brings us to the stand-out worst feature of an otherwise excellent game: inventory management is a nightmare. When trying to buy or sell, all you get is a completely disorganized list of items with no helpful filters (like viewing only weapons or armor) to find what you’re looking for, or even stacking of identical items. There’s also no way to quickly swap out weapon mods - going up against different kinds of enemies requires different types of ammunition, and having to navigate the inventory screen to swap every time is a pain.
That said, it is a huge relief that the controls do not bear the typical scars of platform reassignment surgery (aka, a console port). Mouse and keyboard controls work beautifully, though the Mako’s steering controls tend to be squirrelly, resulting in a lot of over-correcting. To hack computer consoles and locked containers, you can solve a minigame that’s a sort of circular Frogger (also redesigned from the console version). Hard-level puzzles are tougher than they look.
On the whole, Mass Effect has outstanding production quality. The graphics aren’t technical wonders, but they are finely polished (though some strange flickering shadows on faces can be extremely distracting), and the design and detail of the aliens, particularly the Salarians and the Turians, is exceptional. The huge volume of voice work is almost all excellent, as well - the cast is full of recognizable voices like Seth Green (Robot Chicken, Family Guy), go-to deep-voice guy Keith David (Requiem for a Dream, Halo 2, Fallout), Lance Henricksen (Aliens, Millennium), and Marina Sirtis (Star Trek: The Next Generation), making the extensive dialogue trees and complex character interactions (complete with occasional “woohoo!” as The Sims call it) more interesting to explore. I did run into a couple of crash bugs towards the end, but averaging one crash every seven hours isn’t bad for a game of this size, and is nowhere near enough to make me warn gamers away from such a fantastic adventure. Mass Effect deserves a spot on your shelf next to the rest of the PC’s great RPGs.
DRM Alert
Mass Effect’s SecuROM copy protection requires an internet connection to activate your installation before you can play. Furthermore, it will only permit you to activate on three computers before you have to phone in and request more installs. (You can reinstall as many time as you like, but only on those three computers.) On the plus side, you don’t need to keep the DVD in the drive to play.
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Category: PC
Language: English
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