Although Mass Effect has some obvious charm, that charm is short lived and at best it fails to deliver fully on its promises. The constant emphasis on combat, something many have come to expect from North American titles quickly becomes tiresome and leaves players with a bad taste in their mouth. Mass Effect maintains a futuristic, sometimes comical atmosphere throughout the entire game, yet it never really makes you laugh. Its resource management system is, at best, woeful and the interaction and dialogue between the games either extraordinarily cliché, or just plain bland characters is only barely able to get the story across but somehow manage to remain stiff and unlikeable throughout the course of the game. The weapons and their subsequent upgrades are absurdly unrealistic even when factoring in artistic license and the games setting. The multiple branching dialogue paths makes finding the correct path that you're supposed to play the game difficult at best as reloading from previous saves becomes necessary, and at times absolutely crucial in order to get the proper ending to the game. To make matters worse, the game is hardly playable in its default 'real-time' mode. It's slightly better in the turn based mode, but the lack of respawning enemies and legendary equipment makes reaching a high level near impossible.
Mass Effect was a title that promised to deliver, but sadly, despite the potential of the game and its setting, it achieves a less than mediocre level of satisfaction from playing it at best .
13/40
Famitsu
These are the same people who gave Halo 3 a 37/40,so don't tell me they are biased against 360 games. It's over guys,the 360 holiday season is finished.
This is the reason why the PC and PS3 will win.
KittyKatB
Wow...just WOW! I love critics who aren't afraid to tell like it is. I wonder if they ever reviewed KOTOR though.
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