First Impressions Mass Effect

After getting a few hours into playing Bioware's latest title Mass Effect I'd have to say I'm not that impressed. The game delivers on it's promise in creating a new universe that will entice gamers to go into the journey of trying to save the galaxy (I know its cliched but that's the way it is). It has a brought a visual style that is very impressive considering the varying amount of environments. The facial expression engine works well enough but characters tend to suffer from (what I like to call) an evil eye problem (Everything about the characters show expression except their eyes like they're dead). Once the game gets into a nice flow it's actually a lot of fun with a great deal of depth in its story line. The action sequences are were the game starts to shine.

Alright now that you know what is done well, here is what's bad. The majority of the game mechanics seem poorly thought out. For instance the control for vehicle steering and aiming is poorly implemented. (Translation: the controls suck in a way that will make you want to take your life) The game lacks any kind of useful training system leaving players to fend for themselves.Though the game looks pretty good I've been seeing a good amount of frame rate drops and noise in the overall scenery. The in game dialog scenes are placed in some of the most inconvenient places (i.e. just before a major fight). Often forcing the player to have to repeat these fill in the blank scenes over an over again should they die in combat (The auto-save should have been implemented better). The major problem that I'm seeing with Mass Effect is the never ending elevator load screens. However, this maybe my biggest complaint it is also the one flaw that I'm really willing to over look since the game itself is quite massive and the 360 doesn't have an abundance of memory. That being said BioWare's Mass Effect is still a good game but it's not to the caliber of most of BioWare's back catalog (i.e. it is not great).