Lady Pyre
Wolffy000
Speaking of games, it's too bad Mass Effect sucks. Well, not
sucks, but it certainly straddles some odd line between being awesome and crap.
Aw... and the concept sounded so nifty. I'm not even that into sci-fi, but I liked the way they were talking about decisions affecting the outcome of the various scenarios and of the entire game... I thought I might actually buy a 360. But if it's all hype, I guess I'll just... play my PS2 some more. Damn. You have all this "new" and "amazing" technology. Why can't you people make any good games with it?
mad And why is it they always save the sexiest voice for the strong, silent characters? Hmm. Or maybe it just seems sexier because every time they actually say something, you're kinda shocked.
That
is the highlight of the game, and the part you want to play it for. It's nice to be in a hostage situation and be able to either negotiate or just kill them outright. The character dialogs are interesting and you enjoy talking to them, and all the ancillary information is well defined and makes the universe interesting and colors other specie's views of you and visa versa. Too bad the main parts still feel like they railroad you on what you do.
However the combat and exploration are so painfully dull and/or frustrating that it makes you want to not play it. Combat ranges from mindless to frustrating back and forth. They market it as a shooter (for the combat) but it doesn't actually require anything resembling skill to do so. Which would be fine if it worked like a ******** RPG. You just hold down the trigger and hope your enemy dies quicker than you do. Setting combat higher or lower in difficulty seems to do nothing. Handling the different weapons feels terrible. I tried using a sniper rifle and the damned thing feels useless simply because it shakes realistically, but with
no way to steady your aim at all. It auto-adjusts your shots, but to what degree they don't explain nor can you figure out. I've found myself mostly running into rooms with a pistol and holding down the trigger until something's life drops. Grenades and skills feel mostly useless with some exceptions.
Your allies are semi useless. They'll provide support but even having them on "active" I still haven't seen any of them use skills on their own, let alone intelligently. They also won't heal you or themselves when someone is dying. Enemy AI is equally retarded, where it's intelligent up to the point where it's taking cover with it's side completely exposed to you rather than backing up because it has a ******** gun. The downside being that enemies tend to all rush you at once and throw every skill at you, which usually leaves you paralyzed while they all shoot you and there isn't a damned thing to do about it. Which might not even be bad if your allies would do something. Anything. ******** heal you, shield you, disable them, something!
Planet exploration: No map, no compass. You get a radar, but you're wandering aimlessly until you run across something. Also, everything is mountainous and feels like a reskin of the last 7 planets you were on. Same goes for the inside of every base or mine on all the planets. Driving the rover can also be a pain in the a** because you expect it to either handle like a tank or drive over everything. It does neither well. Walking around is a pain because you feel slow and can't jump, so you're basically limited to wherever you can walk. If you were on a damned path this wouldn't be a problem, but again, no map and no on screen indication of where they ******** want you to go. Not even "Hey, go north" or something. In fact, a "Hey, seems like the people you're tracking went southwest" is rare.
Manging your equipment, team, etc. is just ******** retarded. It's one of the worst interface systems there is. Items don't stack, you can only carry 150 items (which seems alright since it's all equipment, but then you realize you don't often go to a shop since you're in the middle of missions a lot), and there is no way to reorganize items or tell what character is trained to use what without going into skills (which has no easy access from the equipment menu). When you level up you can only manage who is in your squad at the time, and not all the characters you have even though you all level up at the same time. The less said about it the better, actually.
And yeah, the loading times suck. It's something you deal with, but it still sucks. The part that pisses me off is that when you die they have an over exaggerated death sequence of your character slowly falling, the screen going red, etc. and it takes awhile before you can even reload the last ******** checkpoint. Which in turn, has a loading time.
The story and dialog are good, and talking to people is great. But getting to those points is frustrating at best, especially when
other games on the 360 do the parts where it fails to near perfection. If they had made it a straight RPG, it would've been wonderful. Had they simply spent more time developing the combat and exploration (Two of three major things about the ******** game, mind you) then it would've been perfect. But it's like they steamed ahead with the dialog and forgot if people would actually have fun with the rest of the ******** game.
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