Massive storyline

So, Mass Effect. Yes, the one with the oh-my-god-full-sex-scene engineered shocks and all its variations. Quite a good game actually, not perfect, but still there.

The Good
Well, no one can deny that ME is -in more than one way- a milestone.

Graphics is just exquisite. That is, if you have a halfway decent machine and set it to max. What I saw detail in NPC heads of Crysis, I see it everywhere in ME. There were some bugs with older video cards, but mine were eventually resolved with satisfaction.
The last planet was a crowning achievement for this, I have yet to see anything like it.

Sounds and Music is way above average. There is the usual problem of voices being too shunted even with maxed out volume, -sadly quite common bug lately,- but voice actors and music composers did a phenomenal job.

Story was also good, quite enjoyable with the side trips, even with the cliche evil. The characters were original, mostly not closed into their own stereotype, with rich background info. Having a couple of not auto-generated paragraph of info for every planet you can visit is also a big plus. I found myself not one time just reading them for passing time and smiles.

The Bad
There were a number of things I dislike in ME sadly. Most of them come from being a console-first game.

First, the horribly raped inventory system. I think they had to get a fair number of meetings on the topic "what makes an inventory not work" to get something like this. I liked the fact that you can have dozens of items.... but when its full, and you pick up better equipment, you have no other option but destroy the pickup. Why have a full inventory? Because first, you get a truckload of items per encounter, then there is the fact that you can have 8 characters which all level with you... oh, and there is no mass-delete for items, you have to select them all one-by-one, push delete & confirm... a tedious process. Add the fact that in no way can you access the whole of your inventory, only at a shop, and it comes clean why it is even worse.

The next thing comes from the cute designer-shape conversation selector... for all of your conversation options, you can chose between some pair of words, not one whole sentence, god forbid the whole answer! Most of the time the answer even contains the words... other times it is quite FAR from the answer itself. Very annoying, to say the least!

Of course, the "bad guy" path is -yet again- the usual "I have a bad mouth/attitude problem" kind. There is no real evil path, you work for the very same goal against the same guys with the same guys. Heck, I have a feeling sometimes even the answers to the good/evil paths are the same.

Equipment and their usage... there are -as I already pointed out- a truckload of equipment. They all vary in strength, weaknesses, price and availability. There are two problems here: first, unless you explicitly say so, your gang doesn't even have the brains to use a gun they are proficient in. Second, there is no real variation in the guns other than their stats. Armor are more varied, but guns are not so.

The maps were... repetitive, to say the least. There is one map for every "transport ship", one for every "human colony building", one for every "underground mine" and so forth. The only distinguishing feature each have are the randomly placed junk/containers and some locked doors. Other than these, they are all the very same. There are some unique places, like most of the main quest ones, but other than that, no variation whatsoever.

The story is good, but has some interesting jumps and quirks that are not explained... Some info vital are learned seemingly of thin air, plus the fact that a delusional, paranoid, hysterical ("The end is near, robots gonna kill us all!") armed and dangerous, out-of-touch-with-reality individual is not dispatched with haste to the nearest (perhaps military) mental clinic is laughable, if you ask me.

Lastly, they still can't make a head-molding tool that does not produce eerie female heads. Well, at least it's waaay better than that of Oblivion.

All in all, Mass Effect is quite good game to pass a few (20-30 for main quest, about 10-30 for all others... oh, 3*, if you want to play all difficulty levels) hours, but has its problems as well. That said, the goods outweigh the problems, even if some of them are annoying as hell.

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