Great package, little content.

User Rating: 5.5 | Mass Effect PC
By Slonor | Review Date:
This is basically your average X-Box game ported to the PC. The graphics are great and so is the voice acting. The plot is also quite captivating. Unfortunately, it all ends there. The combat is interesting at first, but gets repetitive fast. You don't have to pick up or collect ammunition. Different ammo types are more like upgrades for your weapons rather than bullets that you have to conserve for situations when you really need them. Items are also picked up automatically. There are four categories of weapons: sniper rifle, machine gun, shotgun and pistol. The rifle and pistol are accurate and slow, while the other two are notoriously inaccurate. Neither represents any realistic weapon you might see in reality, and that's the gist of the game: just go through the missions and keep yourself alive. No ammo conservation, no involved tactical decisions, and your teammates are immortal. Just keep yourself alive by retreating from the stupid AI and you'll be fine.

The game tries to give you an open-ended sense by providing you with the ability to do optional missions (side quests) that span across many galaxies, but many of the missions are generic with repetitive maps and facilities, objectives, etc... And the galaxies and subsections thereof just make the game more difficult to navigate, since you will soon realize that most planets can, at best, be "surveyed" (click a button and find one object) and described to you. Nothing else happens on them. For instance, the Sol system (the one with Earth and Mars) has no planets on which you can land and I don't think it even has many planets that can be surveyed. At most, you'll find objects on which you can land in a given solar system. The rest are just there to give it a feeling of depth.

You have your own ship you can use to travel anywhere, but there simply isn't anywhere interesting to go. Your teammates have different skills and actually participate in intelligent discussions and commenting, but the tactical benefit of choosing one over the other is highly limited.

Ultimately, the "tactical" combat, team selection, flying and conversations just help move the plot along. It's not a game where you play for the combat and the plot is the icing on the cake (such as in Fallout Tactics or Silent Storm), but rather a game where the involving and interesting plot is the only thing working to keep you from uninstalling it. Seriously, the combat gets boring FAST!

I actually had trouble rating the difficulty since the game is mostly easy and boring, with a few scenes that are next to impossible to complete due to in part your inability to tactically influence the battlers one way or another.

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