Freelance Henchman
Arcane
I just played through Mass Effect, summing up some of my impressions here.
Bought from: Direct2Drive, because it's getting harder and harder to carry my bulk to shops now
and I am lazy. Installed without trouble though, patching worked and the free "Bring down the sky" extra content installed as well.
GFX: Runs fine speed-wise on a Core2Duo 6300 (the smallest of the bunch) and a AGP Radeon 1950 Pro. Framerate is acceptable on this machine (which is good since this is a FPS/RPG hybrid), though there is a bug with Depth of Field that makes distant lights and scenery look hella pixelated on older ATI cards but fortunately a user made a patch for that (guess Bioware didn't feel this was too bad a bug...). Oh, and self shadows create ugly patches on character faces.
Sound: worked fine, no problems with my onboard sound. Some nice atmospheric music, and appropriate weapon sounds (except for the sniper rifle, which is just weird). Voice acting is OK, love the female protagonist voice by Jennifer Hale O GOD ITZ XTASY!!!!!
Gameplay: The shooter part has 4 upgradable weapons (pistol, shotgun, assault rifle, sniper rifle) for any character, different classes do better damage and have more accuracy with some weapons. Cover system where you hide behind stuff and pop up to shoot. Enemies use cover too. I do play FPS from time to time but am not amazingly good at it. Fighting is fairly easy, though the AI of companions isn't too great. It's actually quite fun, I didn't hate it at least. The classes also have different special powers in combat (warrior, tech or "biotics"=jedi/magic) that I didn't actually use much myself, but can be useful.
Inventory management was kinda annoying since most of the weapons are pretty damn similar and you can find a lot of them. I would have liked a "always equip best weapon" option or something, but you can live with it. Unneeded equipment can be sold obviously, or converted into "omni gel" which can be used to break open locked containers without going through a silly minigame first.
Story and roleplaying: The main storyline felt like a mix of Halo and Knights of the Old Republic, with various other SF clichees thrown in. That said, I still enjoyed it. I may have played too much standard quasi-medieval fantasy stuff lately so the SF atmosphere felt refreshing. I finished the main quest in about 26 hours with a small amount of side quests thrown in and never felt bored. Don't expect ultra hard SF with every physics problem explained, this is more "light" space opera. The micro-sidequests in the main locales can be quite fun, but the unknown planet exploration bits are fairly boring (I did a few of these and ignored them later because they were so boring and cookie cutter, though I didn't play the DLC mission yet). There's this all terrain vehicle thingy that you get to ride around in, which doesn't really handle very well and sometimes is just silly when you are basically driving over steep mountains with it. That is definitely the weakest part of the game (though you get to use the tank in the main quest too, where it's slightly more fun due to less random seeming areas).
Companions are OK, I used the tough soldier girl and the quasi-Jedi alien scientist girl mostly this time. Not too annoying, but not amazing either really. Will use the alien secret agent guy and quasi-Klingon warrior next.
RP means "Paragon/Renegade" choices i.e. good and evil, which is extremely reminiscent of KOTOR (I could swear some of the quests were taken almost 1:1, but that could be my memory). Played through on the Good path this time. There are some choices that are fairly heavy since you can lose companions permanently. The "RP skills" are Charm and Intimidate, which you can spend points on when leveling and which will open up (or make impossible) dialog options depending on the rank you have (its possible to upgrade both, and you will get a bonus from being a certain level of Paragon or Renegade). I spent most of my points on Charm this time around, but you can improve both these skills, I'll try out maxing both of these and mix my approaches to convincing NPCs on the next playthrough.
All things considered I think this is not a revolutionary, but definitely a good game. The presentation is fairly polished. I'll play it through at least twice, so maybe 50 hours of gameplay or so? All in all I felt it wasn't a waste of money.
Thanks for reading! :D
Bought from: Direct2Drive, because it's getting harder and harder to carry my bulk to shops now
and I am lazy. Installed without trouble though, patching worked and the free "Bring down the sky" extra content installed as well.GFX: Runs fine speed-wise on a Core2Duo 6300 (the smallest of the bunch) and a AGP Radeon 1950 Pro. Framerate is acceptable on this machine (which is good since this is a FPS/RPG hybrid), though there is a bug with Depth of Field that makes distant lights and scenery look hella pixelated on older ATI cards but fortunately a user made a patch for that (guess Bioware didn't feel this was too bad a bug...). Oh, and self shadows create ugly patches on character faces.
Sound: worked fine, no problems with my onboard sound. Some nice atmospheric music, and appropriate weapon sounds (except for the sniper rifle, which is just weird). Voice acting is OK, love the female protagonist voice by Jennifer Hale O GOD ITZ XTASY!!!!!
Gameplay: The shooter part has 4 upgradable weapons (pistol, shotgun, assault rifle, sniper rifle) for any character, different classes do better damage and have more accuracy with some weapons. Cover system where you hide behind stuff and pop up to shoot. Enemies use cover too. I do play FPS from time to time but am not amazingly good at it. Fighting is fairly easy, though the AI of companions isn't too great. It's actually quite fun, I didn't hate it at least. The classes also have different special powers in combat (warrior, tech or "biotics"=jedi/magic) that I didn't actually use much myself, but can be useful.
Inventory management was kinda annoying since most of the weapons are pretty damn similar and you can find a lot of them. I would have liked a "always equip best weapon" option or something, but you can live with it. Unneeded equipment can be sold obviously, or converted into "omni gel" which can be used to break open locked containers without going through a silly minigame first.
Story and roleplaying: The main storyline felt like a mix of Halo and Knights of the Old Republic, with various other SF clichees thrown in. That said, I still enjoyed it. I may have played too much standard quasi-medieval fantasy stuff lately so the SF atmosphere felt refreshing. I finished the main quest in about 26 hours with a small amount of side quests thrown in and never felt bored. Don't expect ultra hard SF with every physics problem explained, this is more "light" space opera. The micro-sidequests in the main locales can be quite fun, but the unknown planet exploration bits are fairly boring (I did a few of these and ignored them later because they were so boring and cookie cutter, though I didn't play the DLC mission yet). There's this all terrain vehicle thingy that you get to ride around in, which doesn't really handle very well and sometimes is just silly when you are basically driving over steep mountains with it. That is definitely the weakest part of the game (though you get to use the tank in the main quest too, where it's slightly more fun due to less random seeming areas).
Companions are OK, I used the tough soldier girl and the quasi-Jedi alien scientist girl mostly this time. Not too annoying, but not amazing either really. Will use the alien secret agent guy and quasi-Klingon warrior next.
RP means "Paragon/Renegade" choices i.e. good and evil, which is extremely reminiscent of KOTOR (I could swear some of the quests were taken almost 1:1, but that could be my memory). Played through on the Good path this time. There are some choices that are fairly heavy since you can lose companions permanently. The "RP skills" are Charm and Intimidate, which you can spend points on when leveling and which will open up (or make impossible) dialog options depending on the rank you have (its possible to upgrade both, and you will get a bonus from being a certain level of Paragon or Renegade). I spent most of my points on Charm this time around, but you can improve both these skills, I'll try out maxing both of these and mix my approaches to convincing NPCs on the next playthrough.
All things considered I think this is not a revolutionary, but definitely a good game. The presentation is fairly polished. I'll play it through at least twice, so maybe 50 hours of gameplay or so? All in all I felt it wasn't a waste of money.
Thanks for reading! :D
