Retrospective: Mass Effect

The driving controls make you wonder if BioWare had ever played a game with cars in it before. The left analogue stick is so sensitive to steering that only lunar gravity saves you from barrel-rolling with every twitch, and while you can use the camera to steer, it's another matter entirely when you're asked to drive and shoot. The guns in Mass Effect overheat if you hold the button down, and the rocket towers fire at you intermittently, so what you generally settle on is lining up a broadside and then driving forwards a bit, waiting to be fired at, reversing a bit, waiting to be fired at, driving forwards a bit, waiting to be fired at, and so on, all the while trying to avoid holding "fire" for too long.

Anyway, rocket towers down, you hop out of the Mako and proceed inside. You go through a door and into an empty square room with another door on the left side. You go over to that and the mini-map indicates enemies ahead, so you get ready. In you go, and there's a big blue forcefield in the centre of a square room, with crates abound and big square pillars in each corner. Disabling the forcefield exposes some alien critters in the centre, and they come at you, as do a bunch of Cerberus researchers and soldiers who were working nearby. Following a pitched battle, you decide Admiral Kahoku isn't here, so you go outside, jump into the Mako and go to the next facility.

Two big rocket towers await you. Washing up washing up. Indoors, big square room, door on left. Grrr. Oh look, a big blue forcefield. And some critters. And some men. No Kahoku! Next facility. Two big towers. Square room. Blue forcefield. Shooting. Kahoku! He's dead. That's it. Time to go home.

It's rather cool that the origins of Mass Effect 2 potentially lie strewn across the planets Edolus and Binthu - a shady organisation conducting illegal research on aliens, their plans disrupted by your noble/selfish endeavours. It makes you wonder what else you've seen in the first game that may matter in the second, or even third, not to mention what your actions in these side missions may yet determine. But they could at least have changed the room layouts a bit. And why is it always the third facility that has Kahoku in? Are they taking the piss? These are far from isolated problems, either. Those facilities? All the underground facilities in the game - in the galaxy - look much the same. And did I mention the lifts?

In equally traditional BioWare fashion, there's also so much back-story here that the devs can't help letting you gorge on it - to a fault. Conversations go on for ages as Shepard makes all sorts of background inquiries, segueing from an acid-tongued interrogation of a smuggler into asking directions or inquiring about the local harvesting arrangements in the same exchange. You're also encouraged to read up on everything you encounter in the Codex, with its Public Service Message narration. The fact that BioWare's universe is imaginative and interesting and not just blue horse blue horse is great, but it's also a bit of a hindrance and makes it difficult to maintain pace. Playing through it a second time, skipping all the extraneous fluff, it's sharp and aggressive; an intergalactic race against time to get to a fight against the odds. There's got to be a way to have both.

Perhaps Mass Effect 2 will discover it. It doesn't really matter if it doesn't though, because I will play it anyway. I want Wrex to continue commending me for shooting people. I want to teach Ash not to be a massive racist, even if she's just reacting to the stigma provoked by her grandfather's military "failings". I also hope Matriarch Benezia isn't really dead, even though she blatantly is, because she would have been a better villain than the ultimately slightly predictable Saren.

And in the meantime, I will play it again, because it really does make a difference what you do. A lot of games have different alignments, but most just tell all the people in the universe to respond to you according to a global stat. In Mass Effect, you can be a total dick on one planet and a saint on the next, and this does inform your character development, but it's also reflected in localised responses. There's much I look forward to seeing again in Mass Effect 2, but you can keep your sexy tattoo lady, because it's the ripples and waves cast by what I did in the first game that have me most excited.

But I will miss the lifts. Those load screens better be amazing.