Deep storyline, you'll need to sit through those cut-scenes though
In Mass Effect it’s not the aliens who are the strangers, it’s the human race, and in the shoes of a customisable Commander Shepherd it’s your job to save civilisation from total destruction. You travel across the expansive universe with an elite tactical strike force, visiting citadels and planets, talking to characters, fighting aliens, exploring ruined civilisations and abandoned space freighters, and unlocking pieces of the puzzle in this epic tale.The story of Mass Effect is driven by the game’s moral dilemma system, which presents itself on-screen when you speak to an NPC and takes the form of a wheel. You need to select from a number of options and your choice ultimately affecting your path in the game. Unlike KOTOR, where you merely had a choice to be good or bad, the choices in Mass Effect are far more complex and take a more interesting form and in addition to having light and dark side choices you also have the option to choose a balanced viewpoint. In the course of the game I’ve seen plenty of evidence where the choices that I made early on in the game affected the way that characters reacted to me later on, but disappointingly these choices do not affect the ending of the game. Nevertheless, the whole dialogue system does a fine job at making you feel involved in the storyline rather than just being on the outside looking in.
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Click for larger imageIf you’re the impatient type Mass Effect won’t be for you, it’s extremely slow paced despite bouts of fighting. During the dialogue sequences you may get to the stage where you’ll just press anything just to get past the constant historical references as quickly as possible, but personally I feel it’s this storyline and the interaction with these characters that is the driving force and the strength of Mass Effect. There’s nothing particularly evolutionary about the dialogue system ,it’s essentially the same system that we’ve seen going right back to the days of Baldur’s Gate, but it does allow the writers a degree of flexibility to tell the story well and ultimately we reap the rewards by being able to get as deep into the story of the game as we wish. It’s a dialogue system that we’ll probably see many more times in future EA titles now that they’ve purchased Bioware, which is a good thing, because it does help you to understand, appreciate and engage in the sci-fi tale.
So much effort has been put into the story telling in Mass Effect that the game suffers in other areas. While a lot of effort has gone into excellent character design and the portraying of character emotion, the environments in-game, despite looking superb, can be boring to explore. Many of the Citadel corridors, ship layouts and planets look remarkably similar, yet this repetitive level design could have been avoided by the addition of a few features or by moving things around to disguise the issue.