Loading ...Chris Hunkele sent in a mini-review of his experience with Mass Effect so far and I thought it was important to share it with the group because it helped quelled the “I must have that!” fire in me.
The Good
- Player conversation immersion very cool
- You select responses in conversation which ultimately effect the path of the game
- Defiantly a role playing game
- Audio has a wow factor
The Bad
- In the first 5 minutes of game play I got stuck on invisible shit 4 times and had to quit to the dashboard and resart (See videos below)
- Non-skippable cut scenes ARG!!! If you die you have to watch alllll over again… /pissing me off
- Weapons cache/inventory sucks… not organization to it.. selling off your useless items becomes quite the chore
- Frame rate drop… i thought i was going to RRoD my box again, until it goggled the issue and it seems others are having it to
- The squad control is limited and the AI left me quite frustrated
- I read about this one before, so it might be why i notice it more…. elevator rides… you seriously stand there some times up to a minute doing NOTHING
- Feels like an unfinished product
The Videos
My Opinion
Given how ambitious Mass Effect was, and the “omg it will eat your children!” lead-up to it before it was released, then finally it’s some-what lack-luster reviews (8-8.5 out of 10 average) I get the impression that BioWare set out an insanely ambitious list of items they wanted to get into the game, and while they did get most of them in the game, the extra few months that would normally go into polishing obnoxious things like load times, slow downs and menu navigation simply got the axe because they ran out of time.
I’ve been through enough software releases to know that first and foremost you take care of any blockers or show-stoppers in a product, then you evaluate how you stand on your time line then you polish. It sounds to me like BioWare knocked out all the show-stoppers, sat back and got ready to enter the polishing stage and realized they were out of time.
My Suggestion
Wait for the PS3 version next year. Yea, that’s right, I said it. I’ve been guessing there will be a PS3 release of Mass Effect since middle of last year and that hasn’t changed. Microsoft may have paid for a year exclusive, but they didn’t buy BioWare and now EA owns them, you better believe EA is going to milk that for all it’s worth.
The benefit for the PS3 folks is that you might get refinements and improvements that weren’t in the 360 version because EA needs to make sure it’s attractive enough to buy or buy again depending on the type of player you are.
Just my 2 cents worth. I think I’ll hold out for the PS3 version.
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January 4th, 2008 at 11:29 pm
Interesting… I’ve never gotten stuck like that. Inventory management definitely sucks, but overall I still feel that it’s a great game. I think I’m almost done with a first play-through and can definitely see myself going through again as a different character class. Squad AI could always be better, but I think it does an acceptable job and strikes a good balance between control (for strategy) and simplicity (for battle pacing). There are definitely a few key places (such as the citadel) that have longer load screens, but they usually insert some sort of entertaining squad dialog/radio message/etc., so the pace doesn’t feel too jarred.