Bug Effect
The past two days I’ve taken some time to pick up Mass Effect. I’ve played through it (the main campaign, not much side missions) and I just wanted to share what I thought about it.
On one side, the game seems pretty good. It’s quite enjoyable, but it also has some serious flaws. It would have been a much more fun if it wasn’t so full of bugs. The worst about most bugs is that they often require you to reload a saved game and continue from there on; and you better have saved manually because the autosave is triggered approximately two times during the whole campaign. This is especially anoying after having done a lot without saving - I absolutely hate having to get through dialoge or watch cutscenes more than once.
The list of bugs starts with somewhere in the beginning of the game, where one of the squad members was stuck because of a door that closed when he/she was near it. Walking back so the door opened again was enough to fix, but the guy wasn’t even close to the door, so it didn’t make a lot of sense.
Probably number one on my list of irritations: getting stuck. I got stuck in elevators multiple times (elevator moves, but unable to walk out of it or re-activate it), I got stuck after a dialogue (the conversation ended, but wasn’t able to do anything except for going to the task manager and kill the process); the list goes on and on. Next is a known bug that randomly causes weapons to overheat and stay overheated. Nothing helps - not even swapping to a different weapon. The only remedy is to reload. This actually made me attack Saren in the final battle using grenades.
Issues with missions also annoyed me more than once. In one of the final missions, you have to race the Mako to the Conduit - which in itself is bad enough because the Mako controls are absolutely terrible. The thing is impossible to drive in anything that resembles a straight line (in a direction of your choosing). Anyway, the time you get is 40 seconds, which is so barely enough that it took me almost 10 tries to get it done; those tasks are the kind of thing that are supposed to be a little challenging, but easy enough to finish on the first attempt. Re-watching the damned cutscene over and over again is probably the worst part of this, since you can’t skip those.
Also, when you enter the Normandy you get this ‘decontamination’ thing. All nice, but why the hell do I have to wait so fucking long to get into the damn ship? Realism, okay, sure, but it’s a serious annoyance.
Another thing that I couldn’t help noticing is what I call the Pokemon-effect. By Pokemon-effect, I mean that it feels a lot like the game world appears to be built around the missions you have to do. There’s an area with an entrance and an exit, some enemies in it, a couple of objectives you have to complete to get from A to B and that’s about it. The world is built in a linear fashion, if something isn’t either a very general thing (for example, a place to buy or sell something) or something directly related to a mission, it’s not there. The universe seems like a big place, but most systems have only one or two planets that you can land on, and then there’s only a small area you can actually go to, and all of it is related to one mission or another. Apart from Pokemon, Dungeon Siege 2 is another example of a game that has this badly, whilst for example Oblivion doesn’t and leaves you free to go to places that aren’t of any signifigance at all.
Apart from all the bugs and things that could have been (a lot) better, the game definately isn’t bad, but having to restart because of bugs several times makes the final part of the game a pretty big anticlimax. I did very much enjoy letting the council die, however (they were a major pain most of the time and could have prevented a lot of what happened; then they really don’t have to expect that I save their pity asses once they finally get in trouble - you reap what you sow). It’s probably no big surprise that I didn’t get much paragon points but a lot of renegade points 
The general storyline didn’t entirely chill my bones either. You’re a hero kind of guy, without having done anything significant you’re granted the honour of becoming the first human Spectre, you are just given the most advanced spaceship that has ever been built, and on your own you’re fighting a guy who tries to bring on an apocalypse while being forced to betray your ’superiors’, who refuse to see the danger, at some point in the process. To some extend this reminds me of Freelancer (which is despite its age and lack of pretty graphics to modern standards, certainly a better game in my opinion).
As a final point of criticism: despite that my PC easily meets the recommended system requirements and I ran the game at quite modest settings, the framerate wasn’t exactly great. Especially near the end it was rather poor.
On the positive side: I have to mention that for a science fictiony game, I was impressed with how accurate it is from a scientific point of view. The ‘element zero’ thing is added (a very interesting addition, I might say), and the rest of the technology is based around it. The added element (an element that positively or negatively affects the mass of any matter, influenced by an electric charge) would indeed have very significant effects on technology, but otherwise it is (mostly) scientifically correct. Some things that do bother me are those container things you can shoot everywhere (a plasma container would need to be a lot bigger, and require a power supply to sustain the high temperature required to actually have plasma; an ion container could just as well be a bucket with salt water, and so on), and the FTL (Fasther-Than-Light) travel. They assume that by reducing the mass of the ship to a very low level the ship can accelerate very fast and therefore reach the speed of light, which is perfectly acceptable considering the lack of friction in space. However, this would still not allow you to actually exceed the speed of light (relativity), slow down (more relativity), or manouver around obstacles (like stars or planets - but hitting even a tiny dust particle would be disastrous at such speeds). Also, the fact that inside a ship moving very fast time would progress much much slower than outside isn’t taken into account, which is a pretty major flaw: at those speeds many thousands of years pass in the rest of the universe while the ship makes a jump that seems almost instantaneous to the passengers.
Minus the time spent on redoing things and getting around bugs, it took me about 10 hours to play through the game, and to be honest, I don’t exactly feel like repeating it. Most reviews I’ve seen gave the game pretty high marks, it needs no further explanation that I don’t entirely agree with them, but it’s not bad either, so if you really have some time to waste…
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