I went into town on Saturday with a mate and his girlfriend and whilst we were wandering around we happened to somehow pop into the games shop. And I discovered Alone in the Dark, which I've not got round to playing yet, and Mass Effect.
I spent around 12 hours playing Mass Effect on Sunday to get it completed, and I thought that I'd share a few opinions of it (this is the PC version.)
Firstly, unless you have Shader 3.0 support, disable the shading option in settings. Otherwise you'll glitch. It may seem like an obvious thing, but I forgot and I ended up with all my characters having duplicates of themselves a few miliseconds behind them. It's just enough to get your character looking twice as fat. It does make being thrown into the air amusing though, as for the briefest of instants there's two of you.. one on the floor and one in the air.
Secondly, ensure that the specs you set it at are reasonable. If your computer can't handle those specs, the entire game quits. There's no such thing as lag. There's just your computer closing Mass Effect. It still is visible as a process in task manager though, and it also says that you can't have more than one instance of Mass Effect open at the same time.
Thirdly, and finally for the bugs that I've found so far, I'd try to avoid using the rapid transit around the Citadel. It occasionally crashes, forcing a restart of the game. F6 is your friend here, save after you do anything. It helps.
Apart from these bugs - and the fact that I have to use a workaround to get my AMD 8450 Phenom Tri-Core computer to load up the game, due to some sort of problem with ME and the Phenom line of processors - the game seems almost incomplete. I mean... 12 hours to burn through an RPG? That's awful....
Oblivion took me about 100 hours to burn through, even Quake 4 had more than that!
I was, however, on the easiest level of difficulty and as such things were ridiculously easy to kill. And it's still got replay value. I've only completed one of the four (to my knowledge there's four) romance subplots available. I've only completed the game as a Paragon (that's the goodygoody two shoes) and I've not even unlocked the hardest difficulty yet.
I have unlocked the best weapons however, which was fairly easy and I could get them at about level 30 (half of maximum level.. I think...) and then I just killed everything in the game in one shot or less.
There's one memorable moment where I ran into the last level and there were three or four Geth (the enemy) standing around and I unloaded my shotgun into the middle and they all died, either directly from the shot or from the poisonous upgrade to my weapon.
There is.. in grand total... 6 compulsory missions. A tutorial, 3 to discover where you've got to go, another to go back to the citadel+break out from it after you're grounded by the alliance military, and a final one to save the universe from destruction.
Each one lasts between one and two hours (linear missions mostly... you have to either kill everyone or run past them. No sneaky option that I've managed to find yet) and there's plentiful medical supplies and even plentifuller (if that's a word) supply caskets to restock grenades. Not that I used that many mind... there's only one mission where I felt the need to 'nade everything that moved, and that was because it was easier than knocking them over.
Knock-out 'nades are required to be the goody-twoshoes in one of the missions, and to be in role I had to do it. More work than it was worth though... Only useful thing was that it cleared entire rooms of civilians without me having to run in and knock them out one by one, and saved me having to assassinate the one or two actual enemy sitting around in the crowds.
There's a fairly good variety of weapons - about 6 or 7 makes for Assault Rifles alone (and I don't notice any of the other weaponry) - and you can mod all of them to have more firepower, penetrate shields, blow things to pieces, poison everyone or simply just knock them backwards on target. Or maybe you want it so that your gun heals you whilst it's equipped? A faster recharge rate for your special abilities?
All sorts of nice perks.
Same goes for armour. Although, unforntunately, finding decent armour for your men is a pain in the backside. I went through about half the game on Scorpion I (the first armour you get) only updating what it's single mod was. Then, at about level 20, I suddenly found a plethora of better armours, and so both of my humans are kitted out in Heavy Armour version of the Scorpion VII armour, which is fairly good. Apparently there's a spectre-only armour you can get for your humans, but I'm yet to find it. It's not in either of the two spectre shops, but that might be due to me not doing one necessary mission or something.
A really good thing about Mass Effect is the fact that, despite the lack of a levelling system for the monsters (The Geth Troopers on both Casual, which is easiest, and Hardcore, which is hard, have the same hitpoints, but just do more damage and are sometimes replaced by the elite Storm Troopers as, on the higher level difficulties), it has immesne replay value.
It's currently running at something like £1/hour gameplay for me (12 hours gameplay.. amazon sells it for 12 quid+P&P) but that'll drop down lots. I'm planning on spending as much time as needed to get all achievements (yes.. there is achievements. And they don't look too hard. Apart from one named Completionist.. which I'm guessing will take the vast majority of 100 hours or so gameplay time.. requires that 'the majority of the game has been completed. Shudder. There's about 10 sidequests on every planet.)
Any questions? I'm sure this doesn't make too much sense, so if you need something clarifying, want to ask me something about how the game works or simply tell me how to play the game without using the Soldier/Soldier/Agent setup that I have found works fairly well. I need to work out how to sneak past people instead of just blow things up and hope it works....
It's worth the money. Get it if you haven't got it!