Sorry I didn’t respond earlier, I was trying to see how far I could get into a second play through before work tomorrow.
To make it clear, I do like Mass Effect. But at the time of my last post, I did so many of those off-world fetch missions I just had to vent. This is why I said you might see a full review next Sunday, so I have time to let everything settle and can reflect on it.
I have played KOTOR, I loved replaying it on my PC. Except for the graphics, I feel it was an overall better game than Mass Effect. That may be why I came off unimpressed earlier, there were a lot of things, some little, some big, that KOTOR did better. Which, admittedly, is odd since they’re very similar games made by the same company.
They both have a very familiar format actually. You start in a action oriented opening, wind up stuck for a while on in a city where you get your bearings and run into a lot of playable characters, get a ship, told about four planets you need to visit, which afterwards you move onto the finale.
I feel Mass Effect however stretches itself too thin. Very jack of all trade, master of none. You have probably at least 30 planets to land on, but, excluding the main story ones, most of them have very little to offer. There’s a vehicle you freely control in the game, but handles poorly and it’s hard to shoot and drive. But you’re stuck driving and shooting in a lot of instances. You have 6 other characters, but there’s not a whole lot you can do with them. You can’t control them in or out of combat, only give them orders, they’re not as heavily involved in the story as they could be.
Probably a big disconnect between me and some of these other reviewers is they probably love “cinematic” gaming or the story line. I don’t care for heavy handed imitation of movies in games, it’s a turn off for me. Mass Effect actually has a film grain filter (which is on by default) that goes over the visuals, and the game only plays in widescreen as well, putting up black bars on a 4:3 ratio. I think both of those are silly and distracting, especially the film grain filter, which originally made me think my TV was messing up a little bit.
As for the story, I thought it was fine for a game, again the larger life cinematic style of story telling was off putting for me. Everything is very dead pan and serious, which I felt only worked in the game’s third act. Just about everything you do adds “codex” entries which are snippets of info about the galaxy you’re in. I read some of them, but never really felt pulled in.
If you really love cinematic style gaming and read a lot of science-fiction, then you probably will love this with all your heart’s content. I find the cinematic style a turn off, and I’m much more of a casual fan of Science-fiction, so I’m mostly focused on the gameplay. And for me, the overall game tries to hard to encompass everything with vehicle stages, too many empty planets, and a half twitch/half RPG combat system.
Even though most of the uncharted worlds are a drag, the main quest line, and smaller missions associated with it are fun and merits a replay. There are some good dramatic moments towards the end of the game. Once you get accustomed to the combat system and get some good weapon upgrades blasting through tons of enemies feels good. Also, the game treats each character you make as a separate career, and as such, if you beat the game with one, you can reuse the same character and carry over his/her items and levels to a new game. Probably make getting all the achievements a lot easier. (Which by the way, unlock power-ups.)
Bottom line, I enjoyed Mass Effect, but I enjoyed Knights of the Old Republic a lot more. It was a lot more livid, had good humor, better characters in my opinion, and lots of good minor story arcs, that flowed well with the main objective.
