This post is from one of several previous incarnations of this site and probably doesn’t quite fit the current format. In a former life this was a group blog and a tumblelog before it became a static jekyll site. If anything looks broken or is worded oddly that could be why. Pardon the dust.
Dear oh dear. It seems to me that we’re in a strange predicament at the moment. The sheer budget, visual polish and hollywood-ification of a lot of next-gen output is throwing our good/bad detectors off kilter. There’s something very wrong when a game like Mass Effect sneaks into the metacritic charts alongside 90 percenters like Bioshock, The Orange Box, CoD4 and even Halo 3. Let’s not beat about the bush, Mass Effect is a terrible game.
Fantastic character design, yes. Decent voice acting, yes. Pretty good writing, yes. Nice cut-scene cinematography, yes. Those things would be wonderful if this was an animated movie, but games are meant to be played, not watched. Apparently people are so blinded by the glossy visuals that they’re unable to call it for what it is.
Mass Effect has the most uninspired level design I’ve ever seen. Most of the environments are barely designed at all. Locations look ok at first glance, but take a look at the overhead map and you’ll be lucky to find yourself in anything more elaborate than a giant rectangular box room or on a snaking road taking you directly from A-to-B.
Combat would be passable if your enemies weren’t often so tiny on screen that they’re obscured by your equally tiny targeting reticle. So much for “the whites of their eyes”. At one point, frustrated with repeated insta-kills, I went into the options and set the combat difficulty to easy, only to find the one-hit kills still in effect. Mini-games played to open item containers can barely call themselves games at all. And the over-plentiful items plundered from within are a selection of boring weapons, dull armor, or worthless upgrades. None of which have any appreciable effect on your character’s handling or combat performance.
Many UI decisions are simply mind-boggling. Your team’s health is represented by 3 small red bars in the lower left of your screen. If a team mate is damaged, but regenerating, their bar turns green. So red is sometimes good, sometimes bad, and green is… what, exactly? Good luck figuring it out at a glance.
The colour contrariness is also carried through to the inventory screen where you can compare your currently equipped items against those you’ve picked up. Here, the compared item’s statistics are shown as green if identical, red if worse and yellowy green if better. But there’s no grading of these colours, so an item that’s slightly worse in one area, but much better in another shows up as having one stark bright red bar and one barely perceptible yellowy green bar.
The ineptitudes pervade almost every aspect of this game, and I stumbled across a blog post a while back that did a fantastic job of dissecting each horrible misstep in turn but I’m having trouble digging it back up. So for now, I’ll have to leave you with the above cautionary morsels and hope you see fit to take the mainstream reviews with a generous hunk of rock salt.