Mass Effect is a game I was pretty unimpressed with even when it was new for a number of reasons. I loved the Infinity Engine games on PC for their deep, strategic gameplay and storytelling, but like most digital RPGs they were a bit lacking in the, well, roleplaying department. Whether you played a "good", "evil" or "neutral" character you were still walking through the exact same linear plot, beat for beat. The only difference is you could maybe resolve an encounter a slightly different way for a different reward or do a branching plotline for a short while, but for the most part it was just empty choices leading to the same end state. Instead, their replayability was derived from trying out a wide variety of different classes and party compositions much more than for their roleplaying potential.
Mass Effect takes that hook away in favor of homogenized third-person cover-shooting action and gives very little back in exchange. You get to choose one of three flat, predetermined backgrounds for your character (which just changes a line of dialog here and there and affects precisely nothing else) and as for classes... well, they're all just variations on "guy who shoots stuff and maybe has powers that make him more efficient at shooting stuff". Which makes no tangible difference in how you play anyway since the AI-controlled enemies are dumb as dirt and constantly leave huge portions of their body outside of cover for easy sniping. There's no ammunition management to speak of, just cooldown between each shot, and virtually every enemy you kill drops more guns with randomized stats, so you'll be drowning in them unless you stop to inventory manage every ten minutes or so. Also, you're required to carry one weapon of each type at all times even if you have no skill points in using them and even if you're playing a class that can't ever put any skill points into that weapon type, so you'll be pulling out the wrong weapons in the middle of a fight constantly. I didn't think I'd ever be pining for the lame two-weapon system of modern shooters like Halo, but hey, at least Mass Effect managed to surprise me once.
There are no decent diversions from all the shooting, either - every planet you visit is just another nondescript hallway full of cardboard targets to shoot, and the only 'puzzles' are lame minigames you've seen in dozens of other things. But don't worry about having to think about these puzzles or spend more than 3 seconds solving them, because you can also just pay some omnigel and completely skip past them. Vehicle segments exist but are just as boring, having you center every enemy on the screen and pump them full of infinitely-regenerating ammo until they're dead. I also figured out very quickly that quicksaving and reloading will top off your car's shields any time you want, so vehicle trips just serve to fill more runtime and give you free experience points in an exceptionally monotonous way.
Mass Effect was lauded for its "choice based narrative", even though it's just as shallow and insubstantial as everything else it has on offer. You periodically choose to be a nice guy ("Paragon!") or a jerkass ("Renegade!"), with more choices opening up later depending on how many such choices you made before; so of course you're locked into picking one or the other exclusively or you miss out on content later. Like in Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 though, your choices make virtually no difference to how the story plays out - sure things change a little in that some races will be more friendly/hostile to you in future games (in cutscenes, almost never gameplay) and some characters will survive or die, but given how they're almost all just exposition machines with no real personality to speak of, it's a bit hard to care. Moreso because ME exhumes any actual worldbuilding in favor of relegating everything to a boring "plot codex" so you can bring the whole game to a dead stop and have paragraph after paragraph of dry Wikipedia text read to you to get caught up. Having a cinematic presentation with narrated cutscenes or bits of lore to find in-game or doing literally anything more complex than shooting things and picking menu options would alienate the Halo-worshipping Xbox fanbase, you see. Even the actors seem absolutely bored to be here, reading off line after line of their characters' dry text with all the passion of a text-to-speech program. That's some supremely bad direction and/or actor apathy in play, because there are big names here like Seth Green, Jennifer Hale and Keith David, and I know all of them are capable of turning in a quality performance.
I can't say I blame them for only putting in the bare-minimum effort to get a paycheck, though, because there isn't the faintest hint of originality to be found in ME's story. It lifts characterizations and plot points wholesale from earlier works like 2001, Star Trek, Star Control, Xenosaga and StarCraft while putting no new twists on any of them, leaving the player with any open-ended questions to consider or even attempting to capture any of the personality and/or humor that made those franchises so memorable. It's also a pretty weak, thirty-hour-at-most plot at its core, pointlessly stretched out to a "trilogy" by cramming it with tedious filler, which seems to have set a pretty godawful precedent for modern gaming as a whole; thanks a lot for that, guys. But hey, it has boobs and almost-nudity and really forced romance scenes, so that automatically makes it good, right? Never mind that when Star Control played on the already-long-dated cliché of the green-skinned space babe in 1990 it was mostly for humor (for crying out loud, they pilot penis-shaped ships called "Penetrators") and Fallout 2 openly mocked cheap, shoehorned sex scenes in video games just like this all the way back in 1998, Mass Effect roars ahead with it in 2007 with no irony whatsoever!
In short, Mass Effect is an overlong and dreadfully boring shooter glued to a boring, badly presented and shamelessly derivative RPG. Like all lousy fan fiction, it's way too in love with itself over the sheer volume of its content to realize it has no ideas of its own or any idea how to fit it all together into a well-constructed story. I honestly can't tell you why anyone considers this game a "classic", let alone one of the greatest video games ever made, when its triteness is plain as day to anyone who's remotely savvy about intelligent science fiction or digital roleplaying games. Saying Mass Effect is great science fiction is like saying Olive Garden is a great Italian restaurant; the only way I can see someone earnestly saying that is if they've simply never experienced anything better. Just because Game Informer told you it's the absolute pinnacle of its medium and you never need to experience anything made before it doesn't mean it's true; it's not like they'd say anything to get you into the game store that owns and sells subscriptions to their magazine just for an easy sale, right? So yeah, just partake of any of the much better, smarter things it's lifting ideas from instead, or if you really set on playing an actiony space opera video game with a long and convoluted plotline, just play Kingdom Hearts instead. Yes Kingdom Hearts is also a clichéd cheesefest and shamelessly retreads plot points from other things (sometimes word-for-word from the original movies), but at least it knows it has nothing poignant to say and refrains from taking itself so damn seriously. Plays a lot better than Mass Effect, too.
And please, if you want cheap T&A, just go to Pornhub. Stop buying crappy games just to see two seconds of booba before the camera cuts...
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Released: 2007, 2008, 2012
Platforms: XBox 360, PC, PlayStation 3