The beginning of the most epic trilogy on the Xbox 360 is as rocky as a cliff's face. BioWare's Mass Effect is an active struggle to play—it fights back against your RPG and TPS instincts, trying to blend both but being good at neither. What it is, however, is an extremely stable bedrock to one of the best video game universes of all time. Mass Effect's aesthetics, characters, and interlocking political struggles are second to none in the seventh console generation, and no amount of clunky combat or barren worlds could ever change that.
I think an interesting distinction should be made here: Mass Effect's universe is engrossing but not particularly poignant. It doesn't have a deeper statement to make about our society like Papers, Please, nor is its plot something that can only be done in the video game format like Undertale. What it does well is delightfully simple: it gives you a fully 3D, novelesque sci-fi/fantasy universe to explore on (mostly) your own terms. You'll get to converse with various species, visit colorful planets, and dive into scads of lore and fictional physics. Mass Effect is a big playground where the goal isn't to find and create interesting gameplay scenarios like in sandbox games—it's to merely learn more. Discovering another codex entry or resolving a dispute between business partners is the crux of the game, not player expression.
This is the main reason why Mass Effect works despite its plentiful shortcomings. At the end of the day, what you'll retain from your experience are the conversations, character struggles, and anxiety over the choices you didn't pick. The last aspect—the choices—can unfortunately have shallow results (especially as the series reaches its close), but it feels meaningful in the moment, pushing you to ponder strange-yet-relatable hypothetical conundrums, like "can this species proselytize on the space-UN's property without a permit?" I think these questions can be enlightening without any kind of consequential follow-through, just because it gets you ruminating over which side of the fence you stand on. That's not to say I don't wish the series had greater ramifications for your actions, but that's not really a problem that the first game has to grapple with.
What is a problem is the gameplay. And no, not just the rubbery Mako sections—the gunplay in Mass Effect is a shockingly jittery and imprecise. Although I'm playing through the series as an Adept on the second hardest difficulty available, the challenge put forth by the game really wasn't an issue (especially once my entire biotic catalog was available). My gripes stem from the fact that fighting enemies is rarely satisfying: the framerate is constantly tanking, your weapon accuracy is laughable, foes are either stationary target practice or blitzing you, re-positioning is cumbersome, and the cover system is so sticky that you're better off manually dancing around corners. Meanwhile, whenever your allies aren't body blocking you or dying to god knows what, they're whittling enemies away at imperceptible rate. Keyword being imperceptible, as its an adjective the game is far too comfortable with.
A big problem with Mass Effect is that it wants to be an RPG without providing the information of one. There are no combat logs or floating damage numbers—the best you can surmise from your damage is how fast the enemy health bar (or tiny shield blip) lowers when you're on the offensive. The game provides you with information on the level up screen, but hard numbers about damage, distance, and percentages are fuzzy when you can't observe them during the gameplay. Leveling up truly feels like an arbitrary experience, outside of grabbing whatever nodes give you access to new abilities. And not even all of them are necessary; by the end of the game I was bulldozing through everything with just Lift and Marksman, the former for disabling foes and the latter for as my best DPS ability. I found that Warp and Stasis weren't even worth the time required to select them from the radial menu.
I don't really like the combat in Mass Effect, but thankfully the player can easily adapt to it. Neither the gunplay nor the (often hilarious) Mako sections reach truly abysmal depths—both are mostly a mediocre roadblock to the story. It also doesn't help that the bulk of side missions take place on the same mountainous, featureless planetoids which all happen to contain one of three buildings-slash-battle arenas. Between sniffing out missions in the Citadel's endless, labyrinthine hallways and having every side mission conclude in one of three drab locations, I was more than happy to be done with the game. I barely even touched its arena-based DLC, which featured endlessly spawning enemies (joy.)
Oh, and the last thing I need to begrudge is that inventory management (on the 360 at least) is a downright mess. You can only delete items one at a time, and any weapons or armor mods you purge return you back at the top of the list where your best gear is, meaning you have to scroll all the way down to find the junk you're trying to toss, delete it, and then repeat the process again. For scores of items. It's cumbersome and on top of that I found a large portion of the mods to be useless—why would you want to pick a mod that poisons enemies or slightly bypasses shields when you can choose the one that gives you nearly 40% more damage to most of the enemies in the game? For a game that prides itself on decision making, the gear you acquire has very little of it.
I don't think my good will for the Mass Effect series was misplaced: the first game spins one hell of a yarn that's ultimately rewarding to play through, even as a stand-alone entry. But it's as adventurous as it is unrefined. Mass Effect's laurels rest on its premise and narrative, not on its combat... or its performance... or its planet variety... combat... enemy variety... AI... or even the game's cinematography, which turns cutscenes into be dizzying shish kabob of quick cuts. But for BioWare to stumble this much and avoid landing flat on its face meant they were onto something truly special with Commander Shephard's enduring debut.
(As a side note: I'm actually of the opinion that driving the Mako provides a nice change of pace and is no worse than the shooting sections. Being at the helm of the galaxy's bounciest tank is not great, but it's no more repetitive and obnoxious than the rest of the game.)
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Images obtained from: steam.com, TheMotleyCrew.com, youtube.com, imgur.com
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