Mass Effect

I picked up Mass Effect today after work… Yeah, of course I got it. I’m a science fiction fan, Bioware product fan, and I’ve been looking forward to seeing what these guys have created for months now.

I spent a few hours playing it tonight, and my initial reaction is pretty positive. You can feel the legacy of KOTOR, and so far the game play really feels like a forward adaptation of that setup. Similar basic concepts with new UI’s and ways to interact with the game. They (bioware) do sort of just pitch you in to the deep end of the game – there’s a “tutorial”, but frankly it wasn’t very deep. Some of the game play is pretty seriously difficult – there’s a “timed event” relatively early in the game that I had to run through multiple times before I figured it out – even to know where to go to get the goals of that “act” accomplished.

After Assassin’s Creed, the environment seems much more “on rails” – limited in where you can go, but the game interactions are significantly more advanced – as you’d hope and expect from a game billing itself as an RPG. It has an aspect of “take cover or you’ll get nuked quickly” in its combat play that I haven’t really gotten the hang of – like so many others, I tend to charge up the middle into withering machine gun fire a couple of dozen times before I get the hint that I need to some something other than use brute force. I’m not terribly brilliant that way…

I’m looking forward to spending many more hours with Mass Effect over the Thanksgiving weekend – but for now, I’m turning in. I’ve got a meeting at work with some folks that I’ve never met, but seriously respect, tomorrow. I’m looking forward to it – which means I don’t want to stay up all night and oversleep getting in to work. Plenty of weekend time coming up.