Mass Effect is an action-RPG that follows Commander Shepard, who is the best soldier with the Systems Alliance, which represents humanity in the wider galaxy. Shepard accompanies an Alliance group on a mission to recover ancient technology that has the potential to advance humanity centuries; however, a traitor, the alien Saren Arterius, sabotages the mission and attempts to kill the Alliance group. From there, Shepard and other recruits must figure out what Saren's aims are and stop him at all costs.
Now, I enjoyed Mass Effect quite a bit, but my overall impression of it -- especially after playing Mass Effect 2 -- is that it's a good game that falls short of greatness due to many annoying flaws. But I'll start off with the good stuff before bringing up the crap that annoys me.
One of the things Mass Effect does better than just about any game I've played is create a living, breathing world. The world building is phenomenal and shockingly unobtrusive. The main world building is done in codex entries, which are short tidbits about races, planets, technology and so on. These are optional to read; none of them is required to understand the story, unlike, say, Final Fantasy XIII, whose story makes next to no sense unless you plow through all the stupid little chapter summaries that contain important info dumping Square was too lazy to include in a non-idiotic way. But I do encourage going through the codex stuff, because the entries add a great amount of depth to the galaxy.
But what really impresses me about the world building is that relationships and conflicts between races are readily apparent even without poring through the codex. Certain important past events will come out in dialogue, of course, but even without that, tensions are easy to spot, and it's easy to get a feel for an alien culture based on how its citizens act. Not that everyone is uniform, of course: Much like humanity, each race has its good citizens, bad citizens and those who occupy the gray area. There's a lot of thought put into the occupants of the galaxy.
And that leads into the strongest part of Mass Effect: the writing. The plot isn't anything groundbreaking. It hits a lot of common science-fiction beats, and there are few big twists. The story is constructed fairly well, however, and the dialogue is good, with some interesting philosophical bits and a surprising amount of humor if you make the right choices. Much of the strongest writing goes to one of Shepard's alien companions, a krogan named Urdnot Wrex, who gets plenty of opportunities to employ withering sarcasm and has plenty of surprisingly thoughtful moments.
I mentioned choice earlier: Mass Effect has a lot in common with BioWare's earlier Knights of the Old Republic in that it gives you plenty of choice, both in dialogue and how you choose to go through the story. Dialogue choice is an important part of the game: It shapes the tone of the story and provides for major decisions that have ramifications not only for this game, but in the two other games in the trilogy. (Saves can be imported into Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, which creates plenty of opportunity for unique continuities among players.) There are generally three tones of dialogue that can be chosen: Paragon (diplomatic, friendly toward aliens, resolving situations without violence), Renegade (ruthless, getting the job done at any cost, human-centric) and neutral (boring). Building up your skill with Paragon or Renegade points opens up other dialogue options that resolve situations in different ways than normal, which is always entertaining.
I think what's really interesting about the Paragon and Renegade thing is that they're not a totally black-and-white deal. No matter what, Shepard is going to be a hero and save the galaxy. The difference between the two is in how Shepard approaches that job, and the choices Shepard makes will shape the galaxy for good or bad, depending on the viewpoint of many people in the story. It actually opens the door for some interesting role playing. For the most part, I played the Paragon route and gave my Shepard a strong moral core. My Shepard, however, would not abide by any bullshit, and there would be no mercy for those who crossed the line. Stuff like that makes things interesting.
Now, you may have noticed by now that I've not written that much about the gameplay of Mass Effect. That's because while it's good and fun, it's also where many of the flaws begin cropping up. Mass Effect is about an even split between action and RPG. It controls like a third-person shooter, but there's a lot of meticulous stat-, weapon- and armor-building like in RPGs. The building, however, starts off at the beginning, where you construct your Shepard: Sex, appearance, background, military career, psychological profile and class. All these have the potential to impact the game, but class is the most important. There are six classes -- Soldier, Adept, Engineer, Vanguard, Infiltrator and Sentinel -- that offer combat ability, biotic powers (basically magic) and tech powers, a combination of any two.
While class choice is important, this is where some of the flaws start popping up. Combat isn't bad in Mass Effect, but it's not great, either. There's a cover system that's not nearly as strong as the sequel, and the powers feel unbalanced, too. Like, the tech powers seem to me to be quite unimpressive, while the biotic powers -- especially when maxed out -- are utter game breakers. They're fun game breakers, mind (I was throwing shit everywhere in the final level), but they don't make things particularly difficult.
The weapon- and armor-building is a much bigger pain than it should be, too, because the menu system is terrible. Many of the items are jumbled together, so there's a shit ton of scrolling involved in getting what you want to swap in and out, and it gets annoying fast. There's also an item limit that's easy to reach, so you have to break down items often if you don't remember to sell stuff off. It doesn't help that the only equipment that matters is the highest-level stuff, and it's not really difficult to obtain that. The menu crawling is just so cumbersome for relatively little reward in gameplay.
Also, for how strongly-written the game is, I wish it did a better job of letting you really feel like you know your teammates. You can talk to them between missions, of course, but realistically, you're going to be using just two of them the majority of the time. So the result for me was that I felt close to my teammates, Garrus and Wrex, but while I liked the other members of the team (except the humans, Ashley and Kaidan; losers, the both of them!), I didn't feel close to them, either. They're just ... there, unused.
My other problems with Mass Effect mostly have to do with visuals. The game can be really glitchy, to the point where I almost got stuck on shit multiple times. The game will slow down heavily every so often, too -- one time it got so bad that it took nearly five minutes for me to walk out of a mine and back to the Mako (the vehicle that is used to roam planets; I could write a whole post on how awful the Mako is, but this is long enough already). And while the main planets are visually distinct, the areas you go to for sidequests feel incredibly lazy in comparison. There are three basic areas for sidequests: Brown facilities (that sometimes have maze-like passages in the main hall), brown mines, and brown interiors of spaceships. Doing sidequests is important for purposes of leveling up and getting the best abilities, but damn, after a while I just had enough of going to the same stupid settings for those things.
Even with those flaws, however, I think Mass Effect is well worth playing. The story is compelling, the characters (those you get to know, anyway) are awesome, and the game really does do a great job of making you feel like a hero with the fate of the universe in his or her hands. Speaking of, I greatly recommend going with a female Shepard for Mass Effect. The voice actress, Jennifer Hale, is leagues better than her counterpart, Mark Meer, who isn't bad, but he doesn't emote nearly enough. He'll be giving what's supposed to be a rousing speech, but he has the same flat tone of voice he uses to like order shit at the store or something.
anyway tl;dr play Mass Effect. And then play Mass Effect 2 I will eventually write to you all about how OMGAWESOME it is.
