A third person shooter as well
Mass Effect does have some third person shooting action in it as well, but the fighting sequences lack the spark that I was expecting. You have a squad of 3 characters and you can issue simple orders to your squad with a single button-press on the D-pad, such as sending them ahead to a cover position or picking a target for them to focus on. You can assign weapons and special attacks to them and like any RPG your character’s abilities and weapon set are determined by the character class you choose at the beginning of the game and the way in which you spend EXP points on the different skills.The three skills in Mass Effect are combat, tech and biotic or you can choose a mixture of all three by picking the Infiltrator, Vanguard or Sentinel classes. Despite the abundance of customisation options and the control you have over moving your party around, it all seems fairly unnecessary as the difficulty curve in the game seems slightly out of synch. I found that even if my squad were killed it was never really much of a challenge to kill the enemy. When you do control the squad they do a fine job at responding to your commands to use their special powers, but they don’t always move to where you tell them to and seem to have a mind of their own on occasions.
Click for larger image
Click for larger imageYou can get pretty deep into the whole customization aspect of Mass Effect and to the novice it may seem overwhelming, but it’s actually not very difficulty to just plough through the game without even assigning commands. Combat can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be, you can play it as a third-person shooter or spend hours in the menus balancing your character’s skill sets and equipping them with the right equipment.
Balancing both the role-playing aspect and third person action hasn’t quite worked as well as it could have and the fighting sequences aren’t particularly engaging or ever feel like you’ve been involved in a real tough battle. Throughout almost all of the fight sequences I personally tried to rush through as quickly as possible so I could get on with the storyline, which is by far, the best thing about Mass Effect.