Written by Citizen Alpha Sunday, 28 February 2010 04:44

My friend pushed for me to play Mass Effect but I kept putting it on the backburner.  It took the sequel coming out for me to finally get my ass in gear and I’m pretty happy I did.  I’m definitely an “explorer” and “collector” kind of guy and the problem is games of this scale eat time like no other.  I’m on the back half of the game and there are a few nuisances in an otherwise great game that are causing me to shake my explorer and collector attitude for a “lets get this game finished so I can play the sequel” disposition.

Mass Effect, if you haven’t played it yet, allows you to jump around the galaxy to new systems, land on planets to survey resources, find weird crap, and typically do some side mission.  I started off initially just cruising around the universe landing on random planets exploring everything and doing everything I possibly could.  Didn’t really seem to matter that I didn’t talk to some guy to get the mission because I’d always get guidance to find the guy afterward and collect another reward.

There are a couple issues that really drive me nuts.  First, driving around the planet in your vehicle, the Mako, was neat at first but after about 2 planets you hated it.  I swear I’d hit a rock the size of a common street curb and the thing would jolt off course and drop me into a canyon that I just spent 10 minutes wiggling my ass out of.  Heading off to some unknown marking on the map, struggling to get there, only to find its something dumb was especially aggravating thanks to the Mako.  Next, if I decided to play it right and actually seek out these little side quests it conveniently adds to your journal what cluster, system, and planet you’re supposed to go to.

Two bad they’re named all this weird shit.  You can’t access your journal from the galaxy map so you have to zoom out, go through a loading screen, open your journal, find the side quest, memorize that you have to go to the Zanador system in the Wangkok system and land on planet Krypton, dart out into the galaxy map, back through the loading screen, and then hunt down where you need to go while your brain plays boogle with the words.

Finally the path finding of your squadmates is bad.  Nay, it’s the paramount of retarded.  Oftentimes I want to send them ahead because if I go down its game over.   If they go down I can heal them and continue. You order someone across a clear empty room near a doorway and you get some snarky remark, “I’ll need an airlift to get there!”  One foot in front of the other dipshit. I need you to check for enemies. Here look I can do it-GAAAAGH.  Game over.

Don’t get me wrong, this game does a ton of things right but dealing with the aforementioned every planet is wearing on my nerves.  I still love it though.  Thoughts?

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