There's not a lot of variety here, but to its credit Mass Effect makes these detours fairly quick, so it's not like you're getting bogged down by them. And while the game finishes on an excellent note, it feels like it finishes too soon. BioWare has made no secret that this is just the opening chapter of a Mass Effect trilogy, so the company has sprinkled potential future plot threads throughout the game.
And maybe it's just me, but it seems that BioWare's games used to be longer than Mass Effect. So for better or worse, Mass Effect will most likely have you wanting for more. There's a built-in timer in Mass Effect, so I know that it took me 19 hours and 9 minutes to get through the entire game.
Of course, I had played Mass Effect on the Xbox , so I was able to blitz through the story for this review. If you approach the game at a more leisurely pace and take time to do more exploration, there's easily another 10 or 15 hours of gameplay here.
There's also a considerable amount of replay value, too. In fact, the game encourages it, since you can beat the game and then start a new one using the high-level character you just used to finish the previous game with.
This means that you get all the experience and skills that you finished with, as well as all the weapons and equipment that you have. Or you can roll a new character and explore different story paths. There are unique quests depending on what you choose for your character's background or if you strive to be a paragon or a renegade. Finally, there are a slew of achievements that you can work toward, but unfortunately these aren't Games for Windows -- Live achievements, and that means that they'll have zero impact on your overall gamerscore if you're a points hound.
As you'd expect, the PC game looks quite a bit sharper than its Xbox cousin, provided that you have the hardware for it. I played on a dual core system with an Nvidia GTX card and it looked incredibly sharp at x resolution. The frame rate was fairly steady, too, though there was the occasional hiccup now and then. I was surprised to see how much of a CPU hog it is, as both cores on my processor were constantly maxed out whenever I played. The PC game doesn't really feature any graphical enhancements, and it uses the same textures, but it still looks better on the PC screen than it does on an HD television.
And the texture popping problems exhibited in the Xbox game were pretty much missing from the PC. This is also an excellent sounding game, especially on a surround sound system. The voice acting is simply superb, as the large cast brings an incredibly varied range of characters to life.
In fact, voice acting doesn't get much better than this. There's the occasional familiar voice, like Keith David as a famous captain or Lance Henrikson as an admiral, but for the most part BioWare enlisted a large number of professional voice actors to deliver the lines for many memorable characters.
Moreover, it isn't just the performances but it's also the quality of the material the voice actors had to work with. Another highlighted change in the Legendary Edition is the adjustments to the way the Mako landing vehicle drives. Combat is incredibly bland because most enemies basically just sit there and shoot at you while you pick them off with two boring weapons, and the rest of it is just driving from point A to point B on the large, open, and mostly empty world maps you can land on and explore.
In fact, in my entire playthrough I never used omni-gel to hack anything once. Have you played Mass Effect: Legendary Edition? Mass Effect: Legendary Edition. By Dan Stapleton Updated: 6 Nov am. Just about every major world you visit contains at least one weighty, life-or-death decision. Enemy AI is barely there. The real problem with the Mako is that nothing you do in it is fun. Combat and driving sections are still lackluster, but a universe this dense with rich lore and consequential decisions is a pleasure to come back to and to welcome newcomers into.
Was this article informative? YES NO. Mostly, it looks great. Mass Effect was always good at big space spectacle, and the cutscene where you first see Citadel Station remains a rush. In-game moments that are supposed to feel significant are enhanced, such as seeing Sovereign blast off on Eden Prime.
Though parts of the sky look apocalyptic, it's no longer a blur of moody red and black like a goth teenager's bedroom and you can actually see the big evil squid-ship in detail. The whole game is brighter, highlighting ME2's shift to shadowy murk and letting you ogle ME1's up-ressed textures. In a rare example of going the opposite way, the snow on Noveria obscures distant landscape you used to be able to see and looks like an actual blizzard now.
The improvements do highlight some old failings. Characters have more detailed faces, but perform the same clumsy animations, and almost every human who isn't Shepard has terrible hair. And some changes aren't clear improvements. Councillor Udina's so shiny it's like he's been dunked in syrup. There's a spot on the Normandy where the lighting makes shadows flicker, and unfortunately it's where an early conversation happens so you get a rough first impression of what having a fringe cast shadows on your face looks like.
One of the defining experiences of Mass Effect was spending ages in the character creator making a custom Shepard, realising later that your cheekbones were so pointy you could cut glass with them, or your eyes clipped through your eyelids when you blinked, then having to decide whether it's worth replaying the start just to fix that. It remains a problem here—Shepard moves their face too much when you're adjusting sliders—though at least there are more hairstyles, and they're nice.
While the revised Mako feels heavier and has a boost, it's still going to flip. The problem was never just its controls, but that the uncharted worlds away from the main questline you drove it across had sheer mountain ranges with objectives at the top or on the far side.
Those planets have been visually overhauled, drenched in horizontal lens flare and particle effects—they're the only place my framerate dropped below 60—but remain dull to be on. The planetary sidequests are as copy-pasted as anything in Dragon Age 2: the same drive over or around mountains to a familiar bunker full of cover-clutter and enemies, the same circular Frogger minigame whether you're hacking computers or recovering a relic.
On the way you might fight a thresher maw, the sandworms infesting the galaxy. The phases of their attacks are slightly different now. You'll still be bored by the third one.
In the years since its release, ME1 has gained a reputation as the "real RPG" of the trilogy because it has all this exploration and freedom, plus the inventory and stat management.
Combined with an exciting and unique combat mechanic, it makes for a fun and absorbing experience that you'll want to see through to the end, just to see how everything turns out--even if the game isn't perfect by any means.
In fact, it's surprising that so many small annoyances and glitches made their way into a game of such general high quality. Still, most players will be able to look past them and enjoy Mass Effect for what it is: A terrific role-playing game with great production values and fun, exciting action. The story is one of BioWare's best. As in most role-playing games of this nature, you begin by customizing an avatar.
You play as Commander Shepard, potential savior of the galaxy, but there's plenty of room to mold him or her as you see fit. Physical customization isn't as deep as you'll find in something like last year's Oblivion, but the system is relatively robust, letting you choose from a variety of preset features, and even letting you round everything off with a scar.
Shouldn't every badass commander have one? Of course, you'll also choose a class. In this case, you've got six to choose from, each with various strengths in combat, tech, and biotics Mass Effect's sci-fi equivalent of magic. More impressively, you will select a few autobiographical tidbits--and these choices aren't just for show. Through the course of the game, characters will refer to your past, and your resulting dialogue options will allow you to react to their comments with various degrees of humility, wistfulness, and scorn.
The narrative is pure space opera, yet there's no denying that BioWare has created a tale of surprising depth and appeal. Surprise number one: Humanity is not the political center of the universe. We don't have a seat on the galactic council, or even a representative on the Spectre squad, an elite group of special forces whose members are given wide berth to solve political and military challenges as they see fit.
In the meantime, a Spectre has gone rogue, ransacking ancient artifacts and unleashing the violent, robotic Geth race on an unsuspecting galaxy. As Shepard, you pursue him across the Milky Way, visiting one alien world after another and discovering the fallen Spectre's intentions along the way.
He isn't the best villain ever created: He disappears for the bulk of the game, which makes finding him feel less urgent than it should.
Still, the journey to the game's exciting end is one worth taking. In true BioWare fashion, you'll be navigating through loads of dialogue trees throughout the game, and how you respond can have life-or-death consequences--though you shouldn't take that to mean that you need to brood over every decision.
Oftentimes, multiple choices have the same result, a somewhat transparent trick that makes it seem as though you have a lot more impact on the conversation than you really do. At important junctures, however, your decisions can affect how missions play out. You can turn friend to foe, console or devastate a suicide-attack victim, or exploit evil corporate executives for fun and profit. And it all plays out amid an intricate melodrama of political intrigue and racial prejudice, and in a galaxy populated by fascinating, complex characters.
There are pages ripped from the Star Wars and Star Trek playbooks, certainly, but quirks such as the interesting speech patterns of the overly-formal Hanar alien race, or the nomadic structure of the Quarian flotilla--a galactic government that's always on the move--make Mass Effect's version of the Milky Way a unique one. When navigating dialogue, you'll also be earning paragon or renegade points, which is the usual light-versus-dark system we've come to expect from the developer.
Unlike in Knights of the Old Republic, however, your decisions here will not affect any abilities you have. However, the intricate relationship between the story and the game proper means that these decisions still affect gameplay--though that effect is usually an indirect one. More interestingly, your paragon and renegade meters are separate, rather than being at opposite sides of a single spectrum. It's a subtle but effective choice that lends itself to Mass Effect's shades-of-gray fiction, where light and dark aren't mutually exclusive.
The main quest starts you on a huge space station called the Citadel, but takes you across a small series of planets before reaching the game's exciting final moments. Not that you're stuck with the main story, since you can pick up a good number of side quests along the way. Some of them are simple and relatively self-contained, while others will send you across the galaxy to uncivilized planets and derelict spaceships.
This involves bringing up your galactic map, selecting a destination system, and going planetside to kick some alien butt.
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