Mass Effect for Xbox 360

I never got around to playing Mass Effect - developer Bioware's insanely popular RPG - back when it was released in 2007. I was still in the throes of World of Warcraft addiction and couldn't tear myself away from raiding Naxxramas long enough to invest 30 or so hours into another game. Now that my WoW addiction has been completely broken (thank god...), I'm catching up on good games I missed while I was a slave to Blizzard's MMO juggernaut. It's been an interesting experience.

There was a time when I would have been absolutely rabid for what Bioware has crafted in this game. An action RPG set in outer space filled with guns and explosives instead of swords and spells is a welcome change from the norm. Add in lots of customization options, skill trees, and more forks in the path than a million copies of Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken and Mass Effect has all the earmarkings of a classic. And it's a very good game - don't get me wrong. It's just that played today, in a gaming market filled with more of these types of games, Mass Effect probably doesn't feel quite as special as it did back in 2007. Is it fair to judge a game made then against today's titles - games that came after it? Probably not. So I'm trying not to hold that against Mass Effect.

Players take control of Commander Shepard in this sci-fi space opera, a no-nonsense officer in the Alliance. In the future, humans have made it into deep space and encountered countless other species. We're no longer the big kid on the block, and some of these other races don't particularly like how brash and headstrong we are. Anyway, after a lot of political intrigue, we learn that humanity really wants a member on the Council - a governing group of aliens with complete authority over a lot of things. The first step in making this happen is getting Shepard into the Spectres - the council's group of elite agents who travel the galaxy fixing problems as they see fit.

While on a mission to recover a beacon, the Commander uncovers some startling news that places the universe in grave danger. It's all way too complicated to explain here, but you know the drill - Shepard will take it upon himself to stop this menace and save everyone. This makes up the main portion of Mass Effect.

What's interesting about the game is that the main part of Mass Effect can be beaten in relatively short order. If one were to just follow the primary story objectives and not branch off for the seemingly millions of sidequests, I'd guess the game could be beaten in roughly ten hours. The player would be missing out on tons of things that make Mass Effect cool, but I think it could be done.

The sidequests make up the bulk of the Mass Effect experience - and for the most part, they're a nice supplement to the main storyline. They offer up a variety of subplots that flesh out the game's A story without feeling like needless exposition or pure information dumps. This is thanks to the game's solid writing. Bioware has always done an excellent job in forwarding the idea that game narratives can be more than ‘save the princess from the castle,' and this is no exception. While the tale in Mass Effect isn't groundbreakingly original (it's pretty much standard issue space opera sci-fi in the Halo mold), the presentation is top notch.

What's also above average about the title is the gameplay. At its heart, Mass Effect is a third person shooter. What sets it apart is its seamless implementation of RPG elements - elements that make it feel like more than just a shooter or a shooter hybrid. Players are given an opportunity to customize Shepard based on several different classes - some are pure soldiers, others rely on cybernetic abilities to augment their combat skills. One thing is certain: they're all deadly. Choosing one class over the other guarantees a different playthrough each time because the way combat situations will be resolved will differ.

Increasing that replayability factor is the Paragon/Renegade system. Fans who played Bioware's Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic or Jade Empire will already be familiar with this construct. Basically, it's the good/evil meter. Dialogue in the game branches out into trees, and decisions made in responses affect the character's alignment. Shepard is free to do whatever he pleases, so he can be molded to fit the player's philosophical worldview. If you want to be a good guy in a white hat, that's doable. Conversely, if you're the shoot first and ask questions later type, that's an option as well. As players level up, they earn skill points - which can be spent to enhance a variety of proficiencies. Among those are charm and intimidate abilities, which will open special dialogue options if the skill level is high enough.

While that's all well and good, it does bring about one of my peeves with Mass Effect: there's just way too much dialogue. Every NPC in the game has a life story they want to tell you, and you'll feel compelled to listen to the whole thing lest you miss out on finding a quest or earning Paragon or Renegade points. The game has a tendency to bog down in these moments, crushed under the weight of its own exposition. By the time players reach the end, they're likely to be clicking through just to get past it all. I'm all for deeper narratives in games, but deeper and wordier aren't always synonymous.

The game's combat is engaging and fast paced and your two A.I. squadmates are generally smart enough to not get killed thanks to idiocy, but why are there only four gun types in the entire game? Sure, there are different "models", but they all look essentially the same. It's an odd choice. Not quite as odd as the armor, though, which does look different - and in many cases, hideous. It's particularly bad for Shepard, because for some reason the armors make him look like he has a healthy case of man boobs. I can experience having moobs in real life, thanks - I don't need it in my videogame avatar.

Other complaints revolve around what a chore driving the Mako rover to explore planets is (it's not so much the Mako's fault as it is the terrain...), the lengthy load times in elevators, and pop in textures. None of those are gamebreakers, though. Instead, they're just minor things that hold Mass Effect back from being essentially perfect.

I'll never know how I'd have felt about this game if I'd played it all the way through back in 2007, but I can guess I would have loved it. I still like Mass Effect a lot even now, several years after the fact. Its merging of shooter and RPG is top notch, the storyline is engaging despite being unecessarily wordy at certain points, it's got great voice acting, and you can go all Captain Kirk and sleep with a blue alien chick. How can you not love that? Bioware may just be tweaking the formula they established with Knights of the Old Republic and advanced with Jade Empire, but it works. There's no need to scrap something that functions as well as this does. There's no doubt in my mind that in the coming years, gamers will look back on this generation of games with great nostalgia - and one of the games they talk about loving the most will be Mass Effect. That should be more than enough to convince you to play it if you haven't already.