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Mass Effect Review (continued)
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Manufacturer: Electronic Arts
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ESRB Rating: Mature
Platform(s): Windows Vista, Windows XP
Release Date: May 27, 2008
Average Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars
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Retail Price: $29.99
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More User Submitted Mass Effect Reviews
Date: 2008-11-12
Great Game, Messed up my computer though.
This is by far one of the best single player experiences I've ever had. The graphics are incredible, I maxed them out on a Intel Core 2 E8400 3.0GHz CPU, 2Gb of RAM, and an Geforce 8800GT (512Mb) 1600x1050 resolution. The models, the textures, the lighting, everything looks great. I'd go so far to say that this looks better on the Unreal 3 engine than Unreal Tournament 3 does.
While I am a first person shooter fan, it was easy to adjust to 3rd person and over the shoulder views. I ended up turning off the "film grain" effect, for a cleaner picture. I also turned off the assisted aiming, as I wanted a more shooter like experience. I was also able to customize the controls and configure everything to my liking easily, something most console ports don't do to well. Upgrading the armor, weapons, and customizing my stats is nicely detailed and pretty complete. The journal and quests are detailed and offer back info on races, governments, and other history in general that adds to the sense of being in the Mass Effect universe. Selecting dialogue is also easy with a simple movement of the mouse and a click. Hearing your character actually speak your intentions is a plus over the Knights of the Old Republic series. The reactions of people to you are genuine, right down to tone and facial expressions. Cut scenes are interact-able, you will have to speak dialogue and sometimes choose an action; it feels like you are playing a movie. This game also has six classes to choose from, each with unique abilities. You can cross class some skills and stats.
The Story line is great. Think of every Sci-Fi movie and you have it in one great game. You can play as a Paragon (good guy) or Renegade (bad guy). Your choices will effect how your crew interacts with you and give you different options down the line. Each of your crew has an interesting back story and your party members have side quests in a round about way. Some of the side quests are mind numbing to say the least. While the Mako is a sweet vehicle, the low gravity on all the planets gets annoying after awhile. Some planets only have Mineral deposits or wreckage on them. To make it worse, often times you'll be annoyed to find that you don't have enough skill to survey the mineral or salvage.
All this said and done, I love the game and have had a many a late nights playing it.
Unfortunately, this game has a HUGE draw back. I bought it not knowing it even had DRM on it let alone how the DRM works. I'd have never bought it had I known about limited activations. Would I have missed out on a great gaming experience? Yes. Activation Limits aside, this game has done something WORSE to my system that makes it NOT worth purchasing. Shortly after installing Mass Effect, I found my computer could no longer play DVDs. Seems SecuROM doesn't like certain DVD drives, which isn't surprising given all the trouble that KotOR had with Combo drives.
Date: 2008-11-09
DRM- No thanks!
Thanks to all who posted concerning the DRM. After researching it, I'v edetermined that it's a suckers move to purchase this game or any game with SecuRom on it.
There are plenty of really great games out there without this DRM hassle. I'll stick to those alternatives.
EA/MS...good job. You lost another paying customer.
Date: 2008-11-09
Good and bad
Graphics were good, the main quest story was interesting, and it ran okay after I applied the patch. I was concerned about the limited number of installs allowed, but EA worked with me on that. The "sex scene" is avoidable if you don't get too close to the other charactors. I found the planetary missions to be a little repetitive, and even with the dowloadable content, entire game seemed a little short, but it is worth playing.
Date: 2008-11-05
Mass Effect is so worth everything
Mass Effect is amazing. I had some technical problems at first (i needed to update my video drivers and at one point my computer had trouble with texture mapping), but one I figured those out I was able to experience the tour de force that this game truly is. I strongly recommend this game to anyone who even kind of likes games with good story lines. This game has an amazing story and the gameplay is solid too. Buy it. It is worth it. Trust me.
Date: 2008-10-31
Quick save before you crash!
I generally don't write reviews for games, but felt the need to warn off customers from this one. I've played through the game beginning to end and the story is a good one, when the graphics work its actually a quite well rendered game very similar to knights of the old republic. thats it for the good stuff.
The problem comes with the constant crashing (15 windows bluescreen crashes and numerous other lockups). EA tech support's briliant advice to counter act crashing was to hit alt-f4 (terminating the program) when it crashed. Also present were numerous texture problems, at one point I found myself driving a quite well rendered vehicle over a non-existent road on either side of which must have been lava, although it could also not be seen. This is surprising in that I have a N-vidia 8800 GTO video card that should easily handle the graphic requirements.
In short I wanted to love this game, but its implementation on the PC, ant EA's horrible customer support has put a nail in the coffin of all EA games for me from here on out.
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