Publisher Microsoft Developer BioWare Players 1 Online DLC Customise Characters, weapons
MORE! on oxm.co.uk BARGAIN HUNT Original price of game £49.99 Cheapest price we found online £17.61 from www.game.co.uk Average pre-owned price in shops Expect to pay around £14
Mass Effect The best Star Trek game never made
Reviewer
Dan Griliopoulos OXM Grill
T
his is all your fault. I’m not blaming you per se, but the unfortunate consequence of my getting to review the best games in the world first, is that I have to stop playing after only a couple of weeks. It feels like I’ve hardly scraped Mass Effect’s surface, yet here I am obliged to cease and write about it, just to tell you what you already know; that it’s brilliant, that it’s massive and that if you don’t like plot in your games (fans of Crackdown and Gears of War exit now please), you might not like this. Right, can I get back to playing now? No?! Grr. Okay, you remember Knights of the Old Republic, the Star Wars prequel that was better than the last three movies? Well, this is made by the same people, BioWare, who also made genius old-skool RPGs like Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights. This is Knights of the Old Republic 3, but outside of the auspices of Star Wars, a galaxy-spanning epic with a twisty plot and lots of humanoid aliens banging on about morality while you massacre
THE KNOWLEDGE What is it?
A galaxy-roaming role-player with a twisty plot.
What’s it like?
Knights of the Old Republic meets Star Trek, and it’s good.
Who’s it for?
RPG geeks and those who wanted more meat from Halo 3.
hundreds of people. It’s a bit like Babylon 5 or Star Trek but with a giant body count and you as the hero. The plot follows Commander Shepard, humanity’s pre-eminent soldier, 50 years after humans have made first contact with alien species. Shepard is a candidate to be the first human Spectre, basically an intergalactic 00-agent who can go anywhere and do anything. During his testing mission, a rogue Spectre called Saren with a grudge against the human race kills another Spectre and Shepard has a technology-induced vision
of a galactic genocide from 50,000 years before, with the insinuation that Saren is seeking to recreate it. From that point you’re chasing Saren and his robot sidekicks across the galaxy, seeking to catch up with him and foil whatever it is he’s trying to do.
Star Trekking
And now the good bit. Fly about in your ultra-magic Starship the SSV Normandy, that’s packed with all sorts of wonderful techno-babble, visiting various planets throughout the universe; chase
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Mass Effect
Did you know?
RUBBISH AUTOSAVES
You only have ten saves in Mass Effect and you’ll need to use them regularly, as the autosave system is crap. We played for two hours on one occasion and lost everything because of the lack of a save.
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ZOOM, ZOOM, ZOOM…
We’re all going on a summer holiday We’re on the bridge of the Normandy, having evicted its old man owner, and fancy a cheap weekend somewhere. Let’s have a shufti at the galaxy map.
Right, this is the galaxy. You can only visit star clusters linked by giant alien jump gate things. Think of them as the ferry to the Normandy’s Ford Cortina.
Pistols: surprisingly effective against robot menaces.
Once your spaceship has jumped to a star cluster, you can pick which system to explore. As Bognor Regis is closed, we’ve popped to Artemis Tau.
down clues to where Saren is and what he’s up to. Once you’ve got to a planet, depending on its civilisation level you either dock your spaceship on the surface, or drop the MAKO (your APC) from orbit for a bit of dune-buggying. (see ‘Dream Rover, Where Are You?’, page 85). When you’ve got command of the Normandy, you can explore the uncharted worlds of the universe, solving people’s problems galaxy-wide. The missions on these extraneous worlds are entirely selfcontained, giving them the feeling of Star Trek episodes; you know that anyone who’s introduced in one of these will either
Every system you can visit is packed with planets. This system has four, but they’re all a bit crap. Even the seafood stall is rubbish (only eels, yuck!).
We were going to pop to Mars, but we’re told it has no atmosphere. No problem, because of our spacesuits, but it’s shut for refurbishment.
These robot zombies move like 1980s TOTP dancers.
Success! We found a nice B&B on the moon and the whole planetoid’s definitely a beach. Bit dusty, though. Still, you can’t beat that view.
Yes, we made an ugly person. But she’s still believably ugly.
Enemies jam your radar, but weapon mods can unjam it.
stay on the planet or be dead by the mission’s end, like the infamous redshirts of Trek history. Downloadable content is therefore likely to take the form of new systems with more planets to explore.
Out-haloing Halo
The most important place you’ll visit though is the Galactic hub called the Citadel, an amazing five-pronged habitat floating free in space, which trumps Halo’s ’s Ringworlds for sheer grandeur and scale. It’s here that you recruit most of your team members in the initial plot setup element after the training level, and here that most of the roaming missions are given out. Of course, inside all the buildings it feels just like KOTOR and that’s the only major problem with the game. At its heart, Mass Effect is an old-style roleplaying game with the now-irritating KOTOR framework at the heart of it. This structure is the only reason this game hasn’t made a
Renegade chats almost always end in executions.
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While waiting in the lift, you’ll often get news reports.
Before entering a mission, you select a balanced squad. Enemies use deployable shields for cover.
There’s a massive selection of armour types available.
BioWare can do almost anything, but they still can’t do sexy.
ten; the branching conversational trees, though amazingly fluid, are tired and the options aren’t always clear. Meanwhile, the locations (save the planets’ wide-open surfaces) have the same old circumscribed feel; it often seems like you’re just running down empty corridors between areas to make the game a bit longer. Indeed, there are some loading issues (which could be a function of our dying debug Xbox 360) which BioWare has attempted to rectify by slackening the pace of your movements with slow lifts and non-automatic doors, making it even more irritating to move between areas. There are fast-travel methods in the Citadel, but nowhere else. Indeed, some time-saving features from KOTOR have been removed, like the ability to change your team at any point outside of your ship or return to it at any point – here you have
to make a lengthy backtrack to the Normandy to switch characters.
Fire and forget
Surprisingly, though, this time BioWare has moved away from the totally automatic fighting that has characterised all its games towards a real-time combat system. There are still turn-based elements – if you hold down either shoulder button the game pauses while you tell your team-mates to change weapons, use special powers and move around or attack enemies. However, you’re responsible for all your character’s shooting, which improves alongside your weapon skills, and it’s good solid fun with enemies flanking, charging into close combat, and mostly using explosives correctly. Okay so they’re not amazingly bright, but on the other hand it’s definitely not easy either.
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You can play as the default Shepard, if you must.
The exceedingly tough yet short-lived Nihilus. The MAKO can travel up nearly any surface.
Enemy biotics (psychics) can cause real trouble in fights. You can get out of the MAKO anywhere on a planet.
The levelling system and special powers themselves are a bit of a disappointment, though you do appreciate them more as the game goes on. Each class has its own special abilities, with the aliens who join your team having their own special classes – for example, Wrex is a Krogan Battlemaster, essentially a soldier with psychic powers, and Garrus a Turian Agent (a technical sniper). Your character has two additional skills – Charm and Intimidate –which unlock conversation options and improve your bartering skills. Beyond that, there are not a huge number of biotic powers to unlock and you won’t be able to control most of them in your first play through, making most combats similar, if tough.
PLAY AND REPLAY If you’ve seen the adverts, you know what Commander Shepard looks like: a strong jaw, a shaved head, a muscular body. Well, that’s one option, but he can be anything you want him (or her) to be. Not only can you customise his appearance, you can customise his background as well, from nine combinations. We chose to be a female space traveller who was the only survivor of a battle on Akuze. Indeed, there was even a whole mission based around the battle, the scientific experiments at its heart and its outcome.
The weapon system is unique, too. Every character has access to just four weapons: a pistol, shotgun, rifle and sniper rifle. These are tucked away on their backs and when you switch between them they kind of fold out into the weapon proper. If you’re not skilled with a particular weapon, you can use it but you’ll hit almost nothing. Weapons don’t have ammo, but they do overheat if you use them too much, seizing them up briefly. Meanwhile, close combat is nearly non-existent, the largest change from KOTOR’s lightsaber and vibroblade fest – merely a random smack happening automatically when two soldiers are close enough.
Body-modding
These weapons aren’t all the same either, with hundreds of variations on each type and modifications available for each. Each gun can take two mods at once, a body modification (no, not the nipple studs, Gillen!) that improves accuracy, damage,
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Mass Effect DREAM ROVER, WHERE ARE YOU?
3 1 2
5
4 THE SHEEP Your team-mates will follow you into any danger because you’re a Spectre. You can explore their motivations for doing this by befriending them between missions.
1
HEAT GAUGE The more you fire, the higher this goes. If it hits maximum you have to wait for it to cool down completely, like Halo’s plasma rifle, which can be lethal in combat.
2
MARKY MAKO This lovable buggy is your ATV, capable of accessing all but the most hostile planets. It can jump about 20 feet in the air and has a machine-gun and cannon.
3
BAR ME The red bars are your health; the white bars are your shields. To the right are your health packs and grenades (good for chucking into a packed room of nincompoops).
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ORDNANCE SURVEY This minimap tells you about objectives and enemies. It can be jammed by enemies, but gun mods unjam it. There’s also a larger map you can pull up anytime.
5
“Almost every time you kill someone they drop swag, so you’re soon carrying round lots of items” Characters can combine two of three possible classes: a soldier, a tech and a biotic.
balance or heat, and ammo modifications that alter the effects of the shots – freezing, burning, knocking back or just plain killing the enemy (if you want to do things the old-fashioned way). It’s satisfying to use them and they don’t bind to the guns so you can change mods on the fly as battles change (anti-personnel rounds for organic enemies, penetrators for heavily shielded enemies, and so on). There’s a nice variety of enemies to fight, from biotic Asari to insectoid Rachni, but you’ll spend most of your time battling the Geth, Krogans and various mercenaries. Almost every time you kill someone they drop swag, so you’re soon carrying around lots of items. If you’re a pack-rat you’ll need to know there’s an arbitrary maximum limit of 150 items you can carry, after which you start breaking them down into Omni-gel – a multipurpose material that can be used for hacking, decryption and other activities.
There’s far too much other stuff to go into here and I wish I had the same amount of pages again. Suffice to say, the astounding vistas of each planet combined with swelling synth chords and the cheesy sci-fi plots of Babylon 5, make this a game for lovers of science fiction and RPGs everywhere. Roll on the sequels!
A galaxy to explore Consistent design Cheesy but exciting plot Driving your buggies straightforward Framerate-induced designed problems
A mammoth, stunning universe to explore
9
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