Review: Mass Effect

Epic bound to hook you

Relevant offers

Gaming

Games of the year revealed Review: Flight Sim X: Acceleration Review: Kane and Lynch: Dead Men Review: Mass Effect Review: Scene It! Lights, Camera, Action Review: Eye of Judgement Review: Viva Pinata Hi-tech xmas: gaming consoles Win an Xbox 360 bundle Win win win

Mass Effect
From: Microsoft Game Studios
For: Xbox 360
Classification: R13
Score: four stars

It's when you suddenly realise that you won't finish Bioware's Mass Effect in a few hours that it dawns on you just how deep and big it is.
With a story that George Lucas would be proud of, you take control of Commander John Shepard, leader of an elite tactical military squad out to stop a renegade alien called Saren intent on wiping out humankind.
You start by customising your character _ you can even tweak minute facial-feature details _ from three main classes: soldier, engineer and adept, and each shapes the type of character Shepard will become.
Using a galactic map on your spacecraft, you hunt for Saren and his Geth allies through dozens of planets _ and it will literally take you weeks to finish the main campaign and side quests.
Interaction with the characters is through a dialogue wheel system. A person asks you a question, then you are given sometimes several topics to ask questions on.
You select an option, then Shepard delivers the line. Shepard's responses tend to be co-operative, indifferent or hostile, and this affects the character development.
With it being a role-playing game at its heart, you gain experience points for every creature you slay, every task you complete and every discovery you make, and you can either let the computer deal with automatically distributing the points for you or allocate them yourself.
You can also customise weapons, equipment and armour through a management area.
Cleverly, Bioware has made the game accessible for veterans who like to tweak every detail themselves and novices who might want to leave upgrades to the computer to sort out.
Mass Effect is an epic game, there's no doubt about that, but it wasn't until about the five-hour mark that I actually started to connect with Shepard and his actions, and empathise with him and his decisions. That's the point when the game hooks you and draws you in more deeply.
This game has some of the best facial character animation I've seen for a while, so it's a little jarring to see things like texture pop-in _ when a texture on an object appears slightly after the object itself appears _ rear its head.
Frame rates take a hit when a lot of things are going on, and at times, team-mate AI was a little off, with colleagues sometimes getting stuck, forcing me to back track to them. Not game breakers, though.
Mass Effect might not be perfect, but it's a memorable role-playing game. One of the best in a great year for gaming.

- © Fairfax NZ News