Space - The Final Frontier, Except When It's A Franchise

Two games I've played through recently are Dead Space and Mass Effect. I picked up the former based upon its sterling reviews and interesting premise of Resident Evil 4 in space, which is reasonably accurate. The latter I owned on the XBOX 360 for well over a year; I never really got into it and sold it along with my console a while back. As fate would have it, I shortly after found it in Zavvi on PC DVD for the princely sum of £5 (around $7.50). Yes, new. Who could resist?

Dead Space I suffered through almost as much as enjoyed. I failed to read the reviews for the PC version and was therefore unprepared for the slow responsiveness of the mouse controls; it felt like the cursor was being dragged through syrup. Disabling V-sync helped a little at the cost of major screen-tear; an aesthetic drawback I didn't feel was worth the sacrifice. Poor controls aside, I found the game initially entertaining but ultimately repetitive. The endless steel corridors grated after a while, and the constant fed ex quests made BioShock's mission design look revolutionary in comparison. Fortunately, the atmosphere and basic mechanics were fun enough to keep me playing until the end. The story was kind of blah -- it was decent enough but incredibly similar to that of the movie adaptation of Doom, which I saw a scant week previous.

All in all, despite the shoddy controls, the game felt solid. It's most definitely heavily derivative of about a dozen other games, principally Resident Evil 4 but also Half-Life 2 amongst others, but it does a good job of meshing those borrowed ideas into a fun game. I'd give it a high 7 out of 10, with the console versions weighing in at a solid 8 thanks to their superior control schemes.

Mass Effect, as mentioned, was a game I struggled to get into on the 360. I think the bad UI was partly to blame; that and the slow start. Luckily, the UI was one of the areas of the game improved for the PC version. Also, while not as well-optimised as Dead Space (clunky controls aside), it ran well enough on my 1530 XPS.

In many ways, I found Mass Effect to be typically BioWare -- and that's not a bad thing. The structure was very similar to previous BioWare games, with an action-packed prelude funnelling out into a less linear first act with plenty of sidequests. You then have the branching "do any of these in the order of your preference" technique before things funnel back in for the finale. I've read a lot of critics knocking BioWare for not mixing things up, but honestly, there are two very good reasons why they don't: million-plus sales and average scores of around 90% for every major game they put out. Put simply, theirs is the BioWare CRPG, and it's no more trite than any other of the numerous CRPG sub-genres.

So to get back to Mass Effect, I found it to be a good game. It's BioWare's best-written after Jade Empire, and their most fun post-BG2, from a mechanics point-of-view. They're still no Blizzard when it comes to actually designing game systems, but I'm sure the EA merger will help them significantly in that regard. The graphics and sound are excellent, particularly the soundtrack (gosh, Jack Wall is talented). Only the blandness of certain areas lets the visuals down. And on that note...

The planet sidequests. Who didn't dislike these? Some are moderately entertaining; some are okay; the majority are, well, not fun at all. Instead of bemoaning the bland overland maps and copy-pasted interior areas, though, I'm going to instead take a slightly different tack and admit that I'm not sure these weren't a somewhat necessary evil. How else to give the impression of a large galaxy to explore? Perhaps less worlds with more content would have been the key. I'm guessing art assets, in particular areas, for a game of Mass Effect's visual fidelity do not come cheap -- the blatant reuse of areas points to that. It will be interesting to see how ME2 handles space exploration.

One thing production costs can't excuse is the item and inventory systems. I just found these poorly designed. Item collection becomes a chore and lacks any of the excitement usually associated with this important aspect of a CRPG. The weapons and armour in ME represent nothing more than a collection of statistics to be compared and contrasted with other items; the actual names and lore mean nothing and are exceptionally dull. The game economy is also seriously imbalanced -- at some point, roughly around the 60% mark, I had all the worldly and spacely credits I could possibly need.

Luckily, despite the dull planet exploration and poor item and economy design, the core story and, importantly, the lore are extremely good. The characters too are worthy of mention. While I couldn't stand Tali's voice-acting -- the actress seemed to be trying too hard, much like Neeshka's from the NWN2 OC -- Williams was fantastic in her mild subversion of what you normally expect from a female romanceable companion. She's a racist, or more accurately a xenophobe, and a certain scene with Wrex (the typically amoral "heavy" companion) had my jaw briefly hanging open. Liara seemed like a bit of a plot device to explain away some of the story, if I'm honest. Kaiden I liked well enough but dropped in favour of Garrus, whose skills were more immediately useful. Of the non-joinable NPCs, Joker was a brilliant character. I also liked Benezia and Saren. Some, like Anderson, seemed too stereotyped. There were points where the writers seemed to be phoning it in, and a couple that simply went down like a lead balloon -- the encounter where Shepard -- an unknown stranger -- gets to decide the outcome after butting into an abortion debate was just risible. To be fair, I think the writer of this scene has owned up and admitted as much.

As a whole, though, the writing was really good. I was very impressed by the work that went into creating the back story. For such a complex and detailed tale the reliance on McGuffins was kept to a minimum, and the Reapers were more terrifying than expected. Well, okay, not terrifying, but you know what I mean. The end of the story was legitimately epic and left me excited about ME2. Something to note about BioWare -- they rarely make sequels, but when they do... well, Baldur's Gate 2 is still the best PC RPG ever (sorry, Fallout/PST fans). I'm expecting something really special. I just wonder how they'll handle the issues of space exploration, the borked inventory system, and the player's choices in the first game. The first two are probably less of an obstacle than the third. If BioWare does actually implement massive plot branches to take those choices into account, they'll bring a lot of the disillusioned critics back into the fold.