496- Drifting Mass

Drifting Mass

Just want to mention before we get started. This game was actually gifted to me by DarkdrifterUK. Thank you for this man, I appreciate it, and you can all check out his stuff here.
www.youtube.com/user/DarkDrift…

Also as a disclaimer. I am not outright bashing this game and most of my negative remarks come out of frustration or simply that I haven't had time to give this game that it required. I'm not trying to sound like an angry reviewer, but rather a cynic who found some flaws or has one too many questions for Bioware. Also I ran this review by a HUGE Mass Effect fan and he agreed with most of what is said here.

"So, yeah. I completely understand your grievances, and I feel your pain. I really do!"
Caesar Rodman.

So then, the one some people have been waiting for. The Grand Finale to the second Preowned Experiment. This one game I got quite the number of requests to cover and seemed rather pleased when I mentioned I’d be covering the title.

Mass Effect.

My basic understanding of the series was very limited, for this is about as far out of my comfort zone as I’ve been next to Final Fantasy. All I really knew going into this one was the following.

1: It’s a Bioware game.
2: Retards pissed their panties when it was discovered you could have sex in this game.
3: Everyone pissed their panties over the 3rd games ending... Except IGN but you know, fuck IGN!

So as someone who avoided the entire trilogy and has no understanding what’s going on with a complete outsider’s perspective…. What do I think of Mass Effect?

Umm, I kinda dig it but I have a few issues with my time cruising the galaxy.

My prior experience with Bioware was that awful Sonic RPG they made for I remembered it being all talk and no action… So to my horror Mass Effect is pretty much that and then some! Okay, to be fair, it does drop the turn based mechanic and adopts more something akin to say Gears of War in that you can hide behind chest high cover and shoot things. While I dig watching bitches go down quicker than MovieBob’s viewership but what I found to nitpick at my patience was how fast I kept seeing the game over screen. I can already see the Bioware faithful and Mass Effect purists chuckling from their doom fortresses over a glass of human blood and chips as I say this, but for whatever reason I couldn’t get my head around this control set up and customisation.

Granted I’m still a filthy disgusting newbie at this type of thing, but I found the game at times didn’t feel like explaining shit to me when it matters. “Oh, if you put all your experience points into this one ability your team mates will heal you!” it chuckled. “Okay then so how do I use the healing ability?” I asked in response, to which the game proceeded to pick his nose and never directly answer the question. I even looked this shit up online and from the sites I went to nobody flat out says how this mask wearing dildo is meant to heal your ass in the thick of things.

Not to mention giving me a skills tree that includes a unlockable to increase my health? Wait? Shouldn’t my health bar increase when I level up or shouldn’t that be a thing from the start? Why do I need to unlock the ability to increase my health exactly Bioware? That’s like beating a Robot Master in Mega Man to gain the ability to shoot my default gun!

Also what is the point of having pistols that overheat? I expect that kind of shenanigans from laser riffles or moon lasers! Not a simple side arm that most games give you infinite ammo for to lay waste to more whores than Charlie Sheen on a coke binge! Now I understand that comes across as petty grievances or flat out nitpicking but that is merely pocket change to the cheque the games endless conversations kept writing. I want to praise Bioware for giving me suggestive options on what to say but when it amounts to my character saying something completely different when she spoke then what was the ever loving point?

I know my RPG aficionado PrinceofMoose is going to slice me into ribbons for getting on an RPG for being a bit wordy, but my defence would be not even the likes of Pokemon, Mega Man Battle Network or even Final Fantasy 13 force fed a thousand word essays down my throat, all the while firing off made up words to try and sound all scientific and alien!

The games goes with the custom character route, which sadly has very few customisabe options in the face and body, then again NO game can match Saints Row 2's customisable options. The backstory for my character was a bit weird for it gave me all these lovely little options to work with, eliminating the need to fill in the blanks myself but rather “this is what we want you to have!” like your mother dressing you for your first day of school. Again, I appreciate the sentiment but honestly Bioware I’m okay with making it up as I go along. How’d you know I didn’t want to role play as Dave Lister who signed up to the force cus he got drunk on Jupiter?

I decided to play as Ann from my comic series WinneBobble. Mainly because she seemed to be the only one smart enough to join the space programme…. Cus the idea of Daisy Dumbass in space terrifies me!

So Ann joins the Normandy ship to sort out some dodgy shit in the universe, all apart of some galactic federation that’s a wee bit judgemental of humans (Can’t imagine why) and becomes involved in a plot concerning something called Reapers. Ann is then promoted to a James Bond Movie title, becomes commander of the Normandy and sets off to save the fucking universe.

That is where the game started losing me.

The reason why it took so long to get this one done was because of how long the game started to become. I found myself going back and forth without a clear idea on what I was doing or wear I was going. I figured that when I got to captain my own ship I could just put my feet up, drink my coffee and order my underlings around. No, the game follows Saints Row 2’s logic of “You’re in charge but we’ll still make you do bitch work!” which always baffles me. Hey I’m in charge dammit! You go and get killed repeatedly by that Asari clone woman!

Yeah that’s where I ultimately gave up on the game. The main thing was I couldn’t refill my heath kits because in the segment before going down into the hive, the game thought it would be real cute to block off all exists. Preventing me from going back to the ship to gain more health or my useless dingbats for sidekicks WHO HAVE A HEALING ABILITY didn’t feel like doing anything apart from talking space bollocks.

Starting this one segment with the same low health and no health kits began to try my patience. Now the game allows you to reload a previous save file which is another good idea (see it’s not all negative) but it did mean replaying entire segments to get back to a previous point. By my 4th time reloading a previous save file I began to lose interest very quickly…. That and Marvel’s Daredevil Netflix series took up more of my attention span. I could go on about textures popping in an out, the ugly character models, the flat soundtrack, the unappealing team mates but then that’s delving into complete negativity and I don’t want you to have the idea I loathed this game. I'm probably one of the few people who actually liked the driving segments, and the pistol is pretty powerful when fully maxed up!

In conclusion, Mass Effect is full of interesting ideas with some being executed very well, but it’s kind of scattered all over the place and kind of wants to do more talking than shooting something. I get that’s the creamy center of most RPG titles but when I feel Final Fantasy 13 isn’t nearly running it’s mouth as much, that’s a bad sign!

Hopefully the sequels are better, I may start this off again in the future but I think I’ve spent too much time on this.

And I didn’t even see one sex scene…. Just wanted to know if the controversy was worth it!