Right before Mass Effect came out I started getting really excited about the game. I had watched all the trailers I could find, read everything that was out there, and it seemed like this was going to be a great game play experience. The Tuesday it came out I picked up the game and couldn’t wait to get home from work to play it. What could go wrong with a Bioware RPG, right?
After playing the game for a few days I’ve completely stopped. I can’t pick it up anymore, all the “little things” wrong with the game had started to add up, and I just wasn’t having fun playing it. I’ve heard the good out weights the bad, but for me it was the opposite.
My biggest gripes with the game are:
- The AI seems really, really stupid. To me, that’s something I can’t just ignore in a title like this. How could they let this happen? My squad mates piss me off the most. I say “Take cover!” and they stand there, in the middle of a firefight like nothing is going on. They may not even be firing back at the enemy that is shooting them. Sometimes they might do the smart thing and get into cover, only to begin shooting into a wall between themselves and an enemy, not realizing they need to get at a different angle to ever hit the enemy. I don’t understand why they didn’t make it so you could directly control your squad members.
- The only skills I get from the morality system are “Charm” and “Intimidate”. I don’t understand why they didn’t implement some cool combat abilities depending on if you were a good or bad guy, like in KOTOR. Charm and Intimidate seem rarely useful.
- I thought the dialog system was going to be a lot more interesting then it is. If someone pissed me off, I thought I was going to be able to choke them mid-sentence, or at the very least interrupt them. This was one of the selling points for me, and it was really a disappointment.
- The controls while driving the Mako pissed me off. I don’t know, I guess I’m used to Halo or something, but I hated it. And the thing would get stuck all the time on little things in the environment.
There is more that bugged me, like the inventory system, but the above problems are the ones that I think have really ruined it for me. I know that many people can over look this stuff for the good, but I can’t. I think the storyline, as far as I was into the game, was great, I loved it. Also the attention to detail was cool, with many things, such as planets, having lengthy descriptions and background stories. Mass Effect did do a lot of things really well, but for me, I just can’t overlook the shortcomings. To me the bottom line in a game is the combat, I would watch a movie if I wanted an excellent story, I’m playing Mass Effect because I want awesome game play. If the combat is hampered because of wretched A.I., Shepard getting stuck inside objects in the heat of battle, or the game just deciding to stop registering my button presses, then what do I have left to really enjoy?
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