Ha, I’m guessing you are curious about that title and exactly which game I’ve been playing! That’s right, Mass Effect. The game that the “think-of-the-children” crowd would like you to believe is more about sex than anything else.

Oh, but they would be wrong. Mass Effect, in my opinion, is a game that really gets you to react as if you were the lead character him/herself. Not just as an extension of your personality, but as if what you say and do has an actual impact throughout the game.

As an RPG, it touched on some moral angles and issues that really brought your own character into the game. From the first part of setting up your character traits and looks, all the way to each individual discussion that you had with others, you basically direct the story line to your way of thinking. The first time I played it, I was acting the part of the typical good guy hero/team player. Encouraging others and making choices that I felt would “save humanity”. This second time through, my attitude is more of the hardcore marine who is more interested in saving his own skin. And the dialogue really does adapt to your conversation, whether good, bad, or indifferent.

The game play was pretty typical of a 3rd person shooter. Based on your character traits, you are able to upgrade skills and use a variety of weapons. This made for a lot of choices when assembling a team. The skill sets of your AI compatriots were also upgraded throughout the game as well, so you could mix and match your 3 man crew to complete technological missions while still having a weapons guy to lay cover fire. The one thing I did notice is that a few of the people were really focused in one skill set (such as technology) so I rarely used them. I tended to go with the more multi-tool characters in order to have a better balance.

The game itself seems to be quite vast as you explore several solar systems. Each system has up to a half dozen planets that are open for you to scan for elements or to physically visit for story and side missions. There were even a few “abandoned” ships that you could land at and search. This made for a very open environment, although, it was hard to keep track of where you had already been to.

Now, the part that had all these people thinking that the game was soft core pornography….It isn’t. I know, it sounds disappointing, but in all actuality, it really gave a human feeling to the game. It was your decisions and how you directed conversation that led to an intimate cut scene. Not to mention the fact that you had to play through about 3 quarters of the game to get to this part!

Alright, that’s out of the way now…Let’s talk about some of the bad in Mass Effect. First off, the steering for your land vehicle is horrible. Since you spend a majority of discovering planets, it requires you to be in the wet sock of a vehicle quite a bit. It does get a little better the more you drive around. But really, I don’t think it would have been that difficult to give it just a base movement structure instead of having the machine follow your point of view. The other part of this is trying to maneuver around hills and mountains. By the look of the machine, you would suspect that it would be easy to traverse a mountain (especially when you are forced to drive up the side of one to accomplish a goal). This is not the case. It’s easily frustrating and the maps do not give any type of hints to get to where you need to go.

My other complaint is that once you beat the game, there doesn’t seem to be any way to go back and find things that you missed. This is especially true with the new downloaded content that recently came out. If they are going to make on open RPG like this, you should still have the option to go back and complete previous missions. Although, I’ll get to do them with my new character, there were a few accomplishments that I would have liked to obtain already.

Overall, I felt Mass Effect could be the beginning of a new style of gameplay. One that tailors the game around the attitude of the actual player, much like Bioshock does with the Little Sisters but on a grander scale. I welcome this sort of immersiveness and feel that this could easily get people that aren’t traditional RPG fans involved. My Rating for this is 4.5/5. I learned to deal with the few downfalls, but overall, it’s a beautifully rendered game and had me interested throughout. And that’s no easy feat!