Mass Effect
Sarah bought me Mass Effect over the weekend. I spent most of Sunday afternoon having a great time running around this huge space station and wowing over the graphics and having a great time with the story.
Let’s talk graphics. Lush, is a word that comes to mind. You can really tell that the game designers had a lot of fun adding tons of detail to their game world. Characters facial expressions and eyes are singularly impressive. I’ve played Bioware games before (Knights of the Old Republic, and Jade Empire) and always ran into the edge of believability pretty quickly due to the lack of graphical quality. This was, of course, necessary due to the fact that their environments and game scale were so huge. Thankfully, such dark ages are behind us. This game is space opera at its most grand.
The gameplay is pretty amazing as well, it ties together the elements of a shooter action game with those of an adventure game and role playing game very nicely. I went in expecting them to get the RPG right, the adventure aspects (e.g. conversation branching) ok, and the shooter passably; but all have been quite impressive.
So anyway, there I am having a blast and thinking that it can’t get any better. Then I get to the point where my character is given a ship, a crew, and millions of stars to steer her by. Yes! Via the ships interface my character seems to fall into a gorgeous galatic map with familar features such as the horsehead nebula and I get to pick a point and say: let’s go there!
From the galaxy view I was presented with a dozen or so destinations. Nice enough I thought, but then I drilled down through that beautiful galactic map and found that each of those destinations had more than one solar system (whoa) and then that each of those solar systems had more than one planet! I was expecting just a one system, one planet type of space exploration (Star Wars, Star Trek, etc.) but no, this game has bigger plans. I pick a planet of interest (say we are getting faint distress call reading from an uncharter planet) and get dropped onto the surface in my airtight Mako vehicle that looks like they modded the personnel transport from Aliens for offroading action (and added a kickass gun turret). I literally said, “Wow,” when I first started driving around under the green sky of the windswept, dust filled, desolate landscape of an alien planet looking for the source of the distress signal beacon. Amazing! The planet was about 3/5ths Earth gravity so I careened about the landscape like some superpowered Mars rover, jumping dunes, climbing mountains, and racing down into valleys.
Check out this Mass Effect trailer featuring galactic exploration to see what I’m talking about.
Leave a Comment