Mass Effect (PC) - Part 2

If you're looking for the first part, you can reach it by clicking here: Part one.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS.

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I'm Commander Shepard and I'm still stuck on the Citadel, looking for anything that can prove rogue Spectre Saren is guilty of any of the crazy things he's guilty of.

One of the leads I'm following up on is a cop called Garrus, and I've just come from a having a shoot out and a short chat in a bar down in the wards, where I learned that he's likely hanging out around this med clinic.

Officer Garrus I presume.

I found the guy having a gun fight with some thugs inside the med clinic. Seems that they were there to stop a doctor from telling him about an injured quarian she'd treated. The quarian was scared and injured, and wanted to trade information in exchange for a safe place to hide. Information we probably want.

The doctor put the quarian in contact with a guy she knows called Fist, but it turns out that he's actually working for Saren! Which means the quarian's in serious trouble if we don't get to Fist's club and put bullets through the appropriate foreheads. It also means that Garrus is joining the team (and that Wrex guy he mentions seems worth talking to as well).

I was going to take this opportunity to talk about how the aliens in BioWare games always seem to end up looking more realistic than the humans, but then I realised that poor Garrus here was actually suffering a bad case of the low-res. I had to do some ini tweaking in the end to get the high detail face textures to show, using this guide on the Steam forums.

Man I never realised how much Ultron from the 'Avengers' sequel looks like a turian Terminator until now.

Anyway I recruited Wrex, then ran back to Fist's club to find another shoot out waiting for me! Seems that no one on this station can resist taking a shot at Commander Shepard. Fortunately there's always a wall (or a bar) to hide behind, so I just have to let my shields recharge and be careful when I poke my head out.

These two on the other hand obviously haven't got the first clue about cover. They're just warehouse workers drafted in after I killed all the real guards, so now I can either kill them regretfully, kill them pragmatically, kill them with extreme prejudice, or pick the blue option and let them live! It's lucky for these guys I put points into charm.

Fist on the other hand wasn't so lucky, as Wrex disobeyed me and murdered the guy. Fortunately he had the sense to wait until after he told us where the quarian is, so now I have fight my way back out of the bar again and race down the street to save her before she's killed. With an actual time limit!

I love the lighting in this game sometimes. Lots of moody reds and blues.

Anyway we jumped in to save the quarian at the last minute, and her information turned out to be the evidence we needed to prove Saren's guilt! And she also wants to join my crew! Ashley will be so pleased to have some aliens about the ship.

Now there's only one last thing to do before we leave this place.

Guns and conversation... more like guns and elevation.

Well I suppose it could be worse. The game could’ve pulled a Final Fantasy VII and sent me walking up 118 flights of stairs.

My second meeting with the Council went far better than the first, leading to Saren's suspension from the Spectres. But he's still out there on his squidship with his robot army doing whatever he wants, and the only person who can stop a Spectre is another Spectre, so there was really only one logical thing for the Council to do here: make Commander Shepard a Spectre so that she'll go away and stop bothering them.

So now I have a licence to kill and the authority to go wherever I want. Wow I just realised that Spectres are basically 00 agents in this, which is ironic as James Bond's always trying to stop Spectre.

To go chase Saren I’m going to need the most advanced human frigate in the galaxy, so Captain Anderson volunteers to step aside and give me command of the Normandy.

Well now I feel like an asshole! It’s a brand new vessel and the guy had exactly one (failed) mission with it before he had to give it up forever. I hope we at least have time to give him back his stuff before we leave, because I don't want all that crap in boxes taking up space in my hangar.

Hang on, I just came through that airlock on the left, so that door at the back must be the outer hull of the ship… but there’s a window on the right that lines up with the blue door in front of it. It's a perfectly smooth hull, how does that work?

I love that the game comes with a map, but I wish the ship layout would make any sense to me.

When I scale the ship to match the cockpit windows (left image), the airlock sticks out of the side, along with the half of the CIC. Also wasn't that airlock door directly to the left of the 'N' when I was looking at it from the outside?

Scale the ship to match the airlock on the other hand (right image) and the deck fits perfectly, though the cockpit is now nowhere near the windows. Well this deck fits anyway, but if you add the rest of the interior to it and look at it from another angle…

…half the decks are hanging outside the ship! Any way you look at it, the ship is bigger on the inside. I suppose you can add ‘Doctor Who’ to the list of sci-fi franchises the game was inspired by.

I realise that none of this matters at all, as long as the player doesn’t notice it. But it’s hard not to notice when it’s literally giving me XP for looking around and examining stuff! The game has such an air-tight universe, with every aspect of it thought out, a codex full of information, and explanations for everything (usually involving mass effect fields), but give the hero ship two seconds of thought and it makes no sense.

Anyway screw it, I’m going to SPACE!

Damn, I'd forgotten what moving around the Galaxy Map is like.

It starts off focused on the ridiculously massive Citadel space station I'm docked at, so I had to zoom out a step to see the Widow system it's located in. Then I zoomed out another step to see the Serpent Nebula containing the Widow system. Then I had to zoom out another step to see the entire Milky Way. It really helps to get across just how unimaginably huge the galaxy is.

Fortunately with the ancient Prothean mass relay network to jump between, my ship is ‘Star Wars’ fast instead of ‘Star Trek’ fast, taking considerably less than centuries to cross the Milky War. So I won’t be relying on Shepard’s grandchildren to get the job done. Unless the mass relays all happen blow up at once for some dumb reason, then I will be.

Just like in Knights of the Old Republic I’ve got three worlds to investigate for the main story, but this time I can go check out any other star cluster I’ve heard about too (and there’s no turret shooting minigame to play through first). Star clusters contain star systems and star systems contain planets, so there’s actually a ton here for me to explore already. Shame it only labels the main ones though, leaving me to get out a notepad if I want to keep track of the rest.

Most 'exploration' involves clicking on a planet and then reading a chunk of lore about it. There is a ridiculous amount of text in this game devoted to planets. But every now and then I get a ‘Survey’ button to click, which gives me a thing. Not a thing I can use, but I’m sure it counts towards an achievement or something.

And sometimes, when I’m really lucky, I get a ‘Land’ button instead. Then I get to bring out... the Mako.

Just look at this damn thing! It’s a six-wheeled space buggy straight out of a 70s sci-fi movie, with an infinite ammo tank turret (with two zoom levels), regenerating shields, and jump-jets. It can scale near vertical inclines, survive any fall, blast almost anything to death in two shots, and somehow seat three people in bulky spacesuits inside its surprisingly diminutive frame.


LATER, ON SOME OTHER PLANET ENTIRELY.

I’ve been racing this over hills, running over geth, knocking down sniper towers, blasting thresher maws, and trying to take better screenshots than this one, and honestly I do not get the hate for this vehicle.


SOMEWHERE ELSE IN THE GALAXY.

Okay maybe the machine gun turret is a bit crap, plus it’s a bit bouncy sometimes which can make it hard to steer on rocky terrain (or a broken motorway hanging between skyscrapers), but I’m not finding it to be a great struggle. Then again I am playing the PC version which controls slightly differently, with the vehicle steering independently to the camera instead of heading towards the crosshair.


ON SOME OTHER GRASSY WORLD.

Also the planets themselves can be a bit like driving around Morrowind on a day when all the shops, crypts and ruins are shut. Maybe I'll stumble across a crashed probe or a bit of ore if I’m lucky, but they're never meant for adrenaline rush action. Some might actually consider the emptiness and sense of isolation a plus though.

Honestly though my only problems with it are that it’s a bit slow, and I get TWICE the XP for climbing out and shooting enemies on foot, so I always have that in the back of my mind, diminishing all my victories. I’m a sniper class, but any time I get any distance from an enemy I’ve got this Mako with me, and it's always going to be faster to blast stuff with the turret.


A FEW MINUTES LATER, ON THE SAME PLANET.

Man, where did it all go wrong? One minute I was Commander Shepard, a Council Spectre on a mission to save the galaxy, the next I’m running around in a field chasing monkeys, looking for a data module. Gotta search them all!

A lot of the side quests in this aren’t really all that, especially as the game basically taught Dragon Age II everything it knows about reusing dungeons. It seems that mines, pre-fabricated warehouses, and freighters are standardised throughout the galaxy, and it doesn’t matter what planet I’m on, I’m going to find myself fighting through the same familiar looking rooms.

Main quest levels on the other hand are all hand crafted and unique. Though they always involve a drive in the Mako eventually. Or a very long walk, if you hate the thing that much.

Every time I leave the ship I can pick two sidekicks to join me, no more, no less. They pretty much match up with the classes I could pick from when making my character, and the bars at the bottom show at a glance what sort of team I’m putting together. Thankfully unused characters get the same XP as the people at my side, so there's no reason I can't leave Tali behind until a mission with robots to hack or bring Liara out when I go to meet her mother. 

Weirdly though there’s achievements for sticking with the same allies for most of the game, which doesn’t seem like a thing the devs should want to encourage.

Man, sometimes I’m really glad about those targeting crosshairs

I’m not seeing many opportunities to use strategy in these fights to be honest, not on normal difficulty anyway. There’s no reason why Liara can’t spam every telekinetic move she’s got one after another, and while everyone (and everything) is floating around Garrus can destroy their shields and cripple their guns temporarily. I’ve got a few tech skills of my own, but the one I’m getting most use out lately is the one that lets me fire my pistol faster, with less heat build up. Bang bang bang bang dead, bang bang bang bang dead… it’s definitely speeding the process up.

In fact I don’t even really need cover any more… is what goes through my mind right before the guy hiding around the corner with the rocket launcher one-shots me. If my teammates are taken out it’s no huge deal, they’ll just get back up again after the shooting's over, but when Shepard goes down it’s game over.

Yay, more slightly improved versions of the gear I’ve already got for me to sort through later when I’m bored. I’ll add them to the massive massive pile.

Uh, hang on… I’ve reached the 150 item limit? That’s a pretty arbitrary limit on the number of things I can haul around, what was wrong with KotOR’s infinite stash? At this point it seems that all I can do is destroy three of the items I've just picked up. There’s no way to clean out my inventory or come back for this gear later, nope the game’s too ‘streamlined’ for that. I can’t even compare it to what I have!

Okay then, I guess it’s way past time for me to start equipping my heroes with some better equipment. It’s rare that I ever find any new hardsuits or omni-tools for Tali, but I often get upgrades to plug into what my characters already have. Oh look the weapon mods aren't even in order either! Stacking identical items would’ve been nice too.

So let’s say each of my three active characters uses two guns in addition to their armour, that means I have 15 different upgrade slots to shuffle stuff between. If I’m fighting geth robots I really should swap in some ammo that works better against synthetics, but if I’m fighting mercenaries then maybe shield bypass or anti-personnel rounds would work better. Even if I'm not bothering with that, I should probably replace all the level ‘III’s with level ‘IV’s of the same type, and all the ‘II’s with ‘III’s… man I’m just glad that mods transfer over to the new weapon when I equip them with a better gun.

Getting new gear is supposed to be a reward, not more work!

At least the shop menus show a picture of the item you’re buying or selling. Well, a picture of the BOX IT COMES IN anyway. Various featureless grey boxes that don’t even have the manufacturer’s name on them. Plus the items don’t have prices or stats or even a green up-arrow on the ones that are better than my current gear. Even the tabs are sitting this one out, so I have to sift through a long list of 150 unmarked items to find the ones I want to sell. Which I guess is everything with a III or lower on it. Maybe even a IV, seeing as the gear in shops is usually worse than what I’ve been finding, making it pointless to save up cash.

Actually there is a reason to sell my trash and hang onto my money, as accumulating a million credits unlocks the Spectre weapons which are far better than anything else in the game, making all loot crates and weapon drops afterwards absolutely unsatisfying instead of just mostly unsatisfying. They're also the closest the game comes to having something special and unique I can equip.

I get the chance to check in with my crew back on the ship between missions, or whenever I want really, and I can be sure to find them standing in the same place they always stand, interacting with absolutely no one else, ever.

If I’ve pushed the story further along since our last chat they’ll often have something new to say; sometimes they reveal more about their culture, sometimes I get a bonus quest, and sometimes I pick the wrong lines and end up having to let them down gently.

I’ve nothing against the idea of being able to romance characters in a video game, but when dialogue choices become like a minefield, then I feel something’s gone wrong. I’ve only come down here to chat with this woman like 3 times in the game so far, just doing my normal standard interrogation thing where I run through every question I’ve got until my codex is full of random Asari trivia and I get my 30XP. Now I'm worried that half the galaxy thinks I was hitting on them.

And so Commander Shepard went chasing Saren, stuff happened, shocking truths were revealed, tough choices were made (with consequences for later games), and after 30 hours or so the credits finally rolled. It all ended with a tragic sacrifice by an old friend, the shocking and cathartic death of an elevator, a flashy CGI space battle, and a pretty decent song by Faunts.

But I don't want to show any of that, so I'll end this with a shot of the Normandy hanging out around Scaramanga's island from 'The Man With the Golden Gun' instead. The game wouldn't let me climb on top of the ship! It can be a real bastard sometimes.


CONCLUSION

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Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within! That’s what the game’s aesthetic reminds me of! This is a much better piece of entertainment though, and that's coming from someone who actually bought the movie on DVD after seeing it at the cinema. Anyway it's a 'guns and conversation' RPG, apparently, so I'll judge how well it performs in each of these departments.

Guns
I certainly enjoyed the shooting more than Knights of the Old Republic’s combat, which was too obviously turn-based under the hood, but it feels more like an RPG pretending to be a third person shooter somehow than an actual third person shooter. The powers help to stand out from the average cover shooter and keeps things interesting, but for me it was usually a 'oh shit, people are flying all over this room now' kind of interesting rather than the 'this is the tactic I'll use here' kind.

Sadly I got little joy out of the accumulation of new weaponry, as they all pretty much felt the same and my class could only use half of them anyway. Somehow the game manages to make collecting new loot into an annoyance and after a while switching weapons and gear became something I'd only think about when selecting new party members before a mission (which is how I ended up with 150 items without realising it). Fallout 3 or Borderlands 2 it ain't.

Conversation
It's lucky then that the conversation side of the game plays so well with the shooting, giving the player something to look forward to after a combat level (and vice versa).

NPCs aren’t just endless fonts of information; you can chat with them as well, and sometimes these conversations have consequences, as the player is asked to choose between Paragon and Renegade responses. But really players will only make that choice once, right at the start, as the game strongly encourages being consistent. I mean seriously, characters can die if you don’t have enough points to unlock the right dialogue choices, even one of your loyal sidekicks, and this can have huge repercussions in the sequels. Even just chatting with someone gives points, so you're never free to roleplay or say what you feel like.

The morality system is even applied to the moral dilemmas you come across occasionally, with the 'right' and 'wrong' choices already decided for you by the writers! At one point for instance Shepard can be put in the position of deciding whether an NPC should be allowed to deny her child a possibly life-saving genetic alteration. The Paragon choice is ‘yes’, so my Paragon character just picked that, collected the XP and +2 Paragon points, then walked away to the next crisis. No thought required!

The main plot is kind of banal really, with the Lovecraftian Badthings waiting in Darkspace to obliterate all life for reasons we can never comprehend, unless we find the conduit and the cypher and so on. The more interesting story in there to me is of humanity trying to prove itself and earn a place amongst the alien races, which Shepard can see from all kinds of perspectives along the way.

The game plays out like a miniseries scripted by several writers, and some sections turned out better than others. The characters aren’t as funny or charming as I remember them being though and whenever they started talking about ‘the galaxy’ I knew I was going to end up rolling my eyes. This was especially awkward when I was supposed to be using my immense max-level charm skill to talk people around, and Shepard’s best response was going “c’mon, you know I’m right, c’monnnnn” until they gave in.

Elevation
Fuck those elevators.


But the main thing that BioWare really knocked out of the park when they made Mass Effect, is the universe.

Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2 did a great job at exploring the 'Star Wars' setting but apart from that what was there for space RPG fans in 2007? Star Ocean 3, Rogue Galaxy... Freelancer kind of? I always thought it’d be cool if someone would actually make us a proper single player space opera RPG based on one of the other established sci-fi settings like 'Star Trek', 'Babylon 5', 'Stargate' or 'Battlestar Galactica'. Then Mass Effect came along and did all of them at once!

You're Commander James Bond of the USS Defiant, launching from the Federation space station Babylon 5 on a mission to track down rogue cylons and solve the mystery of the ancient Stargate network while continually getting blinded by the lens flares from 'Alien'. All this has happened before, and all this will happen again. But when you get down to the details of it, the aliens that BioWare have created, the relationships between them, and the galaxy they co-exist in all very much belong to Mass Effect's distinctive universe, and this game is all about the details. Even if they couldn’t quite get the hero ship to make sense.

And it’s got a new game+ mode, so you can replay the game with the same skills and gear, make different decisions, and get even bigger numbers! More importantly it has different profiles, letting you (or someone else) start a new game on your machine without overwriting your progress. Though the achievements you unlock reward you with in-game bonuses and that’ll effect everyone.

Anyway it definitely gets a bright shiny star from me (how could it not, it's one of the top three games in a genre with three games in it), and I'm looking forward to carrying my Kate Shepard endgame save through to Mass Effect 2. Eventually.

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Next on Super Adventures, something without spaceships I promise.

As always you're welcome to use that comment box below to discuss Mass Effect, the entire Mass Effect series, the epic two page article I just wrote that actually has more words in it than the entire Mass Effect series, or anything along those lines. Or you can take a guess at what the next game is. I'm thinking you probably have an idea.