I would have to say this is the first “adult” game I’ve ever played that’s actually good and can be considered a game. Most are shameless excuses for games just to throw nudity up on the screen, but Lust From Beyond does it with a purpose as it’s part of the story. You pay as Victor who ends up having dreams that teleport him to the world of Luust’ghaa. This is a land of lust that is ruled by strange gods who want to bring everyone to the Land of Ecstasy. You end up going back and forth between these two worlds, Luust’ghaa is a puzzle-solving world with little combat, and then the current world is mostly sneaking around and opening new paths. This is a Lovecraftian game all the way through and it’s what lured me in. The art design is also inspired by H.R. Giger’s work as well (Aliens).
I won’t beat around the bush or hide it. The main selling point for Lust is the hardcore sex scenes throughout the game, but when I say throughout I mean spread out across the entire game. It’s done tastefully and is actually part of the story. With this occult worshipping a god of lust they partake in orgies, torture, and maiming, dismemberment, and all sorts of horrible acts. The game is incredibly violent and disturbing. You have sex with mutilated bodies, strange monsters, and it’s also pretty entertaining and fascinating to see this used in a halfway decent game. There are only a handful of sex scenes in the game and they are key points in the story. To get to Luust’ghaa you have to feel extreme pleasure to transport there.
However, this is an adventure game with light combat, so there is some light puzzle solving, but most of the game is running around labyrinthine levels collecting baubles and keys to open doors. Sneaking around is mostly done early in the game when you learn of a rival cult that split and tried to use the opening of Luust’ghaa to their advantage. This is the most disturbing part of the game where there’s lots of gore and strange sexual encounters. Sneaking in this game is pretty easy but still tense. If you stay crouched nothing can hear you no matter how close you are. There are a few chase scenes, some bosses in fact, and you do get a gun towards the end of the game to use in small parts. Overall, the game never got boring as the gameplay was always tossed up, but I didn’t care for the Luust’ghaa levels. It looks gross and creepy with shiny flesh everywhere, but after a while, it was just the same boring corridors to find ways to open doors. Sometimes I used a lever to move a block, but mostly they get boring. Nothing really happens in these levels as there really isn’t much storytelling here. It feels like an excuse to fill the game out.
I also felt that having the power of Essence felt like a waste of time as you only use it towards the end of the game. You can find Essense pools and use them to raise bridges and lure gross monsters near tumors that it can absorb to open a pathway. It just felt like silly filler content and a pointless gameplay mechanic. However, I did like the creature and enemy design. Overall the entire game looked pretty good and the art direction was great. The atmosphere was very memorable and I feel like I will remember this game for a long time. The characters however are something to be desired. The voice acting is spotty, and I could tell they tried to make these characters stand out, but you don’t spend a lot of time with them and their backgrounds aren’t explored enough. Victor is a cookie-cutter protagonist who is trying to find his girlfriend and save her and then disregards everything just for her. That whole story is cliche and gets old and tiring. I also wish the lore was explored more. What’s here is solid and you get an overall sense of what these gods of lust can do and the cult’s basic history, but instead, we get filler levels of boring key finding.
But can Lust stand out without the hardcore uncensored sex scenes? Yes, it actually can. Even the censored mode works because the game isn’t built around sex and gore. While it helps and adds to the atmosphere you can still enjoy the story and game without all of it. There are a few plot twists in the game that surprised me, and I played the game straight through to the end it was entertaining enough. However, the only time I wanted to quit was when another Luust’ghaa level came up because I knew I was in for more boring corridors and key finding and lever pulling. At least it’s not too easy to get lost or not know what to do. Occasionally I missed a ladder or had to quickly learn the layout of a level because of the number of enemies around, but somehow it just all works.
Overall, Lust From Beyond is a surprisingly decent adventure game with tons of atmosphere, dark horror, and excellent enemy design. The shock value of sex, gore, and dismemberment is second-hand to the entertaining story and levels, and that’s okay. There is a bonus called the Chamber of Pleasure that are just rooms with two sex scenes each, a few not in the game, and that’s just there I guess. Doesn’t really add to the value of the game as a whole. I just want to say don’t go into this game thinking it’s sex every 10 seconds. It’s spread out and used to advance the story or be part of it.
Sumire is a beautifully made game with charming visuals and well-written dialog. While you can finish the game in about 3 hours it’s quality content and I was moved and touched by the story. You play as a young girl named Sumire who has recently lost her grandmother. The death split your parents up and made them distant and you feel like your life is falling apart. One night, a magical seed flies through your bedroom windows and you befriend a magical talking flower who only has one day to let you see your grandmother again.
The game is in a 2D sidescrolling style game, but there’s no-platforming here. This is a typical adventure game, but there really aren’t many objectives and there’s no obscurity or cryptic puzzles here. In fact, there are no puzzles and very few characters to interact with. There is a map with a few areas you can fast travel around to, but there is a good and bad deed system set in place that can change the ending of the story. The game really focuses on being good to people, being the mature one in a situation, and realizing that life is finite. It’s pretty heavy stuff.
Early in the game, you come across creatures you can do good things for which aren’t complicated. Give a scarecrow a hat, give a frog a bug to eat, but what bug you chose will determine a good or bad deed. Other larger objectives have you delivering things to people from other people and these are pretty much done as the story progresses. The first half of the game is spent wandering around collecting a few coins to spend and spend them wisely, on yourself or other people. There are a couple of mini-games thrown in for good measure, but the second half of the game picks up the pace quite a bit as the story concludes.
The music is also fantastic and really gets the heartstrings plucking as you really feel for these characters and Sumire’s understanding of death and just that in life you have to let things go, things end, and death is permanent. Her constant reliance on the flower is also sad and it’s just wishful thinking and false hopes. Sumire also sorts out a love relationship and has to solve her bully issue with three girls who constantly pick on her. It’s stuff every teen goes through in life and it really brought me back to mine. Thankfully, I never felt lost or wondered what to do next as you just move left all the time and the story unfolds itself.
Usually, I frown at games that are this short, but if they have a lot to show in such a short time I’m happy. Sumire has a great story that’s short, but really makes you think back to your teen years and early 20’s of having to face life alone for the first time and realizing every action you do matters and affects you until the day you die. So many life lessons are tossed in here at rapid-fire but dealt with in a touching manner. However, there still isn’t much of a game here. You walk around, collect coins, talk to animals and creatures, do a few small fetch quests, and then move on with the story. It’s satisfying and fun, but I felt the side quests were a bit pointless. It’s not like you have a heavy dialog with these creatures and you come back to them later. It did feel a bit like filler to me.
Overall, Sumire is a beautifully crafted game with great music, heavy dialog that can be really touching and nostalgic, and it just feels like a good wholesome game in the end. It’s relaxing, doesn’t expect too much out of you, and after a few hours, you get a nostalgic trip back to your teens and early 20’s when life just got started.
I’m not much of a visual novel fan. I love reading books and grew up reading a lot, but visual novels are basically just digital manga, and I prefer traditional manga. I bought VA-11 Hall-A years ago and never got around to it because there’s so much reading. What got me interested was the bartending aspect. It seemed like a fun time-management mini-game mixed in and I was completely wrong. However, the strongest point with this game is the fun characters and how invested in their stories I became.
You play Julianne Stingray, a bartender in a cyberpunk world setting nearly 100 years in the future. The bar is close to getting shut down and you’re just living life day-to-day until that time comes. The game is pretty slow-paced and takes quite a while to pick up and get interesting. There’s a lot of character setup and it takes such a long time so it feels natural and organic rather than rushed. There isn’t really any gameplay. I spent more time clicking through dialog than anything else, but I did like all the characters. They were fun, unique, and had great personalities that I got attached to. If I were to say there was an ultimate goal it would be to make amends with your ex-girlfriend who you got into a fight with years ago and need to apologize to, but honestly, this is a slice-of-life type of game. You really only need to just read through everything.
You do earn money at the end of every day and this can be spent on items to keep Jill focused at her job. There will be a hint when you get to your apartment as to what she might want. If you don’t buy this item she won’t remember what customers order and you have to remember yourself. There are also major bills that have to be paid so you need to spend wisely. There is also an optional phone you can view with various news apps. Just some insight into the world really and nothing that matters towards the main story. There is an option to customize your apartment a bit, but it seemed superfluous in the end and pointless.
As you talk to patrons you have to make their drinks. This seemed fun at first, but it quickly becomes dull and stale by day three in the game. There is a recipe book full of 24 different drinks you can make and you can filter them by flavor and type. Patrons will give hints as to what they want and you sometimes even have to read the descriptions to get cryptic ones correct. Drinks are made with artificial chemicals in this world and you have five. There are squares that fill up with each measurement and you can mix or blend the drink and age it or add ice. That’s literally it. I thought you could upgrade the bar and add new flavors and devices, but this is it. You end up cycling through all 24 drinks early on and maybe 10 repeats constantly. It ends up no longer being fun to make these drinks and just interrupts the story. There are also no instructions on the difference between mixing and blending. You need to count how many times the shaker wiggles and if it starts going fast…that’s blended. If you mess up a drink you lose a bonus at the end of the day. However, you can’t serve messed-up drinks as the game won’t let you. Some drinks allow you to add synthetic alcohol as much or as little as you want and this is supposed to change the story somehow…by making characters spill things when they’re drunker, but I never saw this happen.
The one game mechanic in an otherwise interactive visual novel is boring and somewhat pointless. If there was a much larger selection of drinks, or if I could add some later, or upgrade equipment, that would be fun, but what’s here feels half-assed and tacked on. I also don’t like how we never get to know what’s going on in the world. The game hints at things happening politically and with various corporations, and even a hacking group, but we get nothing in that regard. It’s mostly just what’s going on inside the bar and the characters you meet; it stays very local and centralized. I also felt the visuals while artistically beautiful were boring to look at. There isn’t any change in scenery and the static anime-style characters just change facial expressions. It’s very hard to stare at the same background for nearly a dozen hours and make dozens upon dozens of repeated drinks just to stay invested in a character’s story. If it weren’t for the great characters this game would be utterly boring nonsense.
With that said, VA-11 Hall-A is only worth getting into if you love anime, visual novels, or just like reading books. The bartending aspect is a poorly throughout afterthought that hinders the progress of the story rather than helps it due to the small recipe size and laughable mechanics. I really liked the characters here, and the story ended on a nice note. I expected some sort of twist ending where the bar would close early, or the hackers would take over all the androids and something interesting would happen, but we just get a slice-of-life anime-style bartending experience.
Strangeland starts out with you playing like a man I a straight jacket inside a carnival of sorts. The art style is dark, dreary, depressing, and looks great. The point-and-click adventure pixel art of yesteryear looks great and I love this style of visuals. As you talk to the talking entranceway you gain entry to the main area of the game and like every adventure game ever made you progress by exploring, talking to people, and picking up objects.
The main goal of Strangeland is to fight something called The Dark Thing and you are trying to find a golden-haired woman who you think is your lover, but you aren’t sure. You can acquire hints for the game at any time by using the payphone in the main area and this is a really big help. There isn’t much to the controls as you just walk around picking up items, some might need to be combined, and figure out where to use them.
The largest downside to Strangeland is its complete lack of world or character building. Each character speaks in pointless riddles that have no meaning and I don’t understand why. This world looks interesting and I want to learn about it, but it’s so short, about three hours long, and there are so few characters that I feel I have rushed along to the end. Even the ending didn’t really make much sense after all of what you go through feels pointless. It’s not really hard to figure out what items go where you don’t get that many, but there are a few puzzles in the game and they don’t feel like puzzles. I just randomly clicked around and solved them, so there’s that.
This is also a very small world. There are many 8 main screens you visit, and the second half of the game reuses these screens when you are in Deadland. And again, I can’t stress how awesome the art is. There’s gore, gross fluids, strange pits that lead to nowhere, and sadly it’s all smushed into this tiny play area with not much to do. It’s not possible to get lost, and once you exhaust all the dialog options with a character you can no longer talk to them. Your ultimate goal is to kill The Dark Thing, and I believe the ending had a choice, but I wasn’t sure. It ended so abruptly and unsatifactorily that I just shrugged in the end. I really enjoyed the art and the voice acting, but that’s all there really is to the game.
In the end, Strangeland is so short that I don’t have a lot to say about it. It looks good, it’s not super cryptic like most adventure games are, and the voice acting is good, but the story just doesn’t make sense and we never get to know more about the characters. What is Strangeland? Why am I here? How did I get here? Why am I in a straight jacket? Nothing is answered or explored which is the main reason adventure games exist. To explore a world and story and characters. This feels like mostly an art exhibit and nothing more.
I love post-apocalyptic anything. Just the curiosity of wondering what would happen when a man is on the brink of extinction is morbid yet fascinating. Beautiful Desolation takes the isometric point and click of yore and brings it to life with over 40 fully voiced and wonderfully designed characters and a time warping story. The game starts out with you, Mark Leslie, arguing with his wife about someone whose emotional mess you have to clean up. Suddenly a giant object slams into the ground from the sky and brings about the apocalypse with machines. You are now trying to find a way to figure out what the Penrose, the giant object, is and how to stop it from changing the world. The only issue is that doesn’t go as planned and you are warped an unknown amount of years into the future and must stop factions from fighting and chose between groups of characters.
Choices mostly matter before the ending of the game. There are several groups of characters, some warring with each other, and some just single characters that don’t offer any rewards, and you must decide what happens to them all. You fly around an overhead map in your Buffalo transport and objectives are obtained by talking to characters. Each area is small and linear and there’s usually only one person to talk to in each area. The characters are really well done and the style of the game feels like a mid-90’s Fallout with pre-rendered animations in a box and the text appears below it. The characters look amazing from robots to weird fleshy things to plants and various lifeforms. There’s tons of imagination in this game and even the environments look amazing. However, there’s not much else when it comes to exploring.
When you land in an area you will most likely find things that need to be used or find things that need something to be used with. Sometimes a character might need an item, or they might need you to solve a large issue that decides the fate of their race or faction. The issue here is that objectives are so obtuse and cryptic and you can easily miss an option to solve a large problem. For example, you need to ultimately find three items to restart the array to let you back on the Penrose to go home. One item needed is Red Mercury. There are two ways to obtain this and depending on your choices once will always be cut off. There is also one route that lets you fight a few bosses via a weird arcade game. You need tokens to put combatants in this machine. You need at least three tokens to even bother and that’s never explained. To get these tokens you must choose one of three outcomes for a few factions, or the fourth outcome gives you Red Mercury for the array. I wound up missing two of these and only got two tokens in the game so the item I needed from the final boss for the arcade game to get Red Mercury was cut off.
This long string of outcomes that are hidden is a little unfair. I also accidentally decided a fate without even knowing that option would do that and I wasn’t given a second chance. I decided the fate of two factions early on and wound up doing the opposite because I didn’t realize clicking a certain option would launch that decision and it was too late. There are also some items that need to be bought to progress and you need credits that are exchanged for gold. To acquire gold you need to find them hidden in certain areas by just wandering around. This was also something never explained and for a while, I couldn’t figure out how to get credits. There are also some bogus items that you can waste credits on, so I’m not sure if you can end up not finishing the game because you have found all the gold and don’t have enough credits. There’s only so much gold in the game and there’s not much.
One of my biggest gripes is needing to talk to certain characters before something would advance. Icons on the map flash if there is a new dialog for a character, but that’s if you have already done something to trigger that. It won’t flash for items not discovered or anything like that. I had to use a walkthrough through most of the game because there were times I felt l made progress and the next character would give me zero hints on where to go next. Some objectives I could figure out alone, but 90% needed a walkthrough. Just because the game looks mid-90’s doesn’t mean it needs to play like it. It still didn’t stop me from looking forward to the next area and character to talk to as they are so unique and interesting.
Overall, Beautiful Desolation is a well-written and very stylized post-apocalyptic adventure game with lots of nostalgic feelings of the mid-’90s. However, the insane amount of cryptic and obtuse objectives makes the game very frustrating without a guide. I also didn’t like how often you would start feeling like you’re making progress and then get stopped dead at every turn with the only option is to wander around every area until you notice something you missed, and as the game progresses that can take forever. You end up unlocking over 50 areas towards the end and going back to them all is insane. I love the voice acting, the art style, and the story itself, but it’s so unfair and stops you dead in your tracks at every turn. Progress is incredibly grindy here and not to mention the major decisions in the game can easily be missed or skipped over.
I love the Warhammer series a lot. My first introduction was a small figure I was given as a gift in junior high back in 2003. I had a friend who was really into the series and painted the figures and was all in. My parents couldn’t afford the figures so I turned to video games. My first experience was Dawn of War. One of the best RTS games ever made. Then…that was it. I then played Dawn of War II and then Space Marine, but was still fascinated by the lore, art style, and designs. This comes across well in Hired Gun. The game is oozing with style and tons of steampunk design. Weird mutilated bodies everywhere that are full of strange tech, gross underground sewers, and tons of violence and gore. The game looks amazing, but that’s probably the best thing about the game.
It was advertised as Doom set in the Warhammer universe and this it is not. When you start the game you pick your avatar and difficulty and you are off with just a revolver. Right away you take in the amazing art and visual design the series is known for. Then within a few minutes, you can start shooting and moving and that’s when everything falls apart. Now, at first, the gunplay seems fun. It’s fast-paced, punchy, and the guns feel pretty good to shoot. Then at the end of the first level, you are already tired of it because there’s nothing else to do. Every single level is shoot everything that moves through poorly designed levels. Now the art is nice, but the actual design and layout of the levels are terrible. Tons of endless corridors to nowhere, hidden treasure chests that are not interesting enough to find, credits, and places to jump around and wall run on. Yes, it’s fast-paced and feels pretty good, but it’s so boring.
Another issue I have is that enemies spawn at random places and there’s no pattern. You run around an arena shooting everything in sight and when you go pick something up an enemy dropped another is shooting you from behind even though everyone came out of the same door on the opposite side of the room. It can lead to cheap deaths as you get a shield to protect your health and you can buy stims to revive you if you die. There are grenades that can clear crowds, but overall the layout of the levels just doesn’t help. I can jump around everywhere but what’s the point if everyone spawns randomly.
Some levels mix up arenas where you are locked in a room and heavy metal music plays until everything is dead, and then there are just endless linear hallways where you mow down more enemies. Enemies splatter and gib in Unreal Tournament-style glory, but they are not interesting to look at or fight. Everything dies in a few hits and each weapon seemed to do the same damage except for when it came to distance. The game shoehorns an RPG system into the game that feels completely pointless and useless. There are charms, armor, tokens, and various other bits that can be collected, but they can’t be equipped until your next mission. So, why bother with an RPG system if it can only be accessed between missions? Once you finish a mission you’re rated (who cares). You can then complete side missions for greater challenges and better loot, but no thank you. The main missions are drab enough as it is.
Once you complete a mission you can then chose what loot to keep and the rest is sold. Once you arrive at the main hub there are various vendors that allow you to buy and sell weapons and then also bionics on you and your dog. Yes, you get a dog companion that attacks for you, but that’s it. The bionics are bought with credits and you can acquire various powers that kind of help a bit, but mostly you’ll just shoot everything. This is the main gameplay loop. Shoot everything through levels with nothing in between, fight an occasional boss, and build up your arsenal and bionics. The gameplay itself isn’t just boring but so is the story. Now, I’m no Warhammer guru, but with previous games, you kind of get some lore thrown at your real quick to understand your surroundings, but here you just fight this gang and that gang and work for this person. There’s no context. The voice acting is okay, but there’s no reason to care.
Overall, Necromunda had potential and it was squandered with a forced loot system, boring story and gameplay loop, and terribly designed levels. I love the visuals and the lore behind the series, but this game just doesn’t do it justice. If it was a straight-up linear corridor shooter with more thought put into the weapons, enemies, and level design it would have been better. Also, the whole looter shooter thing needs to stop at some point. No one can get it right and it’s widely overused. Sometimes less is more and Necromunda proves that.
I have tried to play this game since it was released numerous times and just couldn’t get into it. After putting 110 hours into the Mass Effect Legendary Edition recently, I decided it was finally time to blow through it. After 40 hours I can say that the game is more enjoyable than I first realized, but also has more flaws than I imagined. Most of the major visual bugs are patched out at this point, but what remains is the core game that can never change or improve without an actual sequel.
I love the premise of Andromeda. The game takes place 600 years after the events of the original trilogy and that’s because a private company sent every species known to Council space out on several arks to the Andromeda galaxy and establish lives on then discovered “golden worlds”. Everyone stays in cryostasis while an illegal AI named SAM watched over all the arks. You play as Ryder who wakes up to the human ark being hit by something called the Scourge. This is a space phenomenon that honestly is never really explored or explained in the game. Strange tendrils reach out and destroy worlds and ships. Your brother also ends up in a coma as his pod was damaged during the incident.
This is where you learn the basic controls and how to interact with the world. The core ideas and gameplay loop of Mass Effect are intact. You can read datapads, talk to people for extra information and story, but in the end, your conversation choices make zero difference in the story. Whoops. I’ll get to that later. Once you finally try to explore the first golden world you realize it’s not. The Scourge changed it somehow and all the golden worlds are no longer habitable. This sense of fear is something I wish the game touched on more. Being lost and stranded in space with no way back home is a really great idea, but they never play upon this much. Once you land not the first planet you learn how to do everything else. Controlling Ryder is a breeze and the character is nimble, has a jetpack to jump around on ledges, can infinite sprint, and the shooting is more akin to standard third-person cover shooter gameplay, but barely.
Let’s go over the combat. Sadly, Mass Effect 3 had more satisfying combat than Andromeda. It plays well, but it’s very generic and just gets the job done. Once again, like in Mass Effect 1, there’s too much loot. Weapon mods, augmentations, armor, armor mods, minerals, random collectibles, etc. This means while each weapon looks unique, they don’t feel too unique. A shotgun feels like a shotgun, an assault rifle feels like an assault rifle. They just picked a center lane or each weapon type and stuck with that. Games like Gears of War have weapons that have their own unique personality. They are almost a character among themselves. At least in Mass Effect 3, the weapons had punch and weight to them, while these do not. The combat is mostly boring and the same enemies repeat forever. You have the kett, Remnant, and the usual raiders. The kett are the main enemy as you are trying to stop the Archon from using this Remnant tech to destroy worlds. More on that later. Then the Remnant is just generic boring robots. Each faction has different enemy types, but the game, in general, is pretty easy and I rarely ever died, even during boss fights.
The biggest change in Andromeda is being able to explore actual planets. There are quite a few here and they are actually really fun to explore. There are many side missions that involve your crew, and there are tasks, but honestly just exploring and doing the main missions was the most fun I had in the game. The open maps feel like major filler and while the worlds look beautiful, and the new vehicle you get is much better to control and it can get upgrades, but no combat, it’s 90% filler. There are tasks you can complete, but most don’t have objective markers so you either have to wander around aimlessly looking for these or use a walkthrough. In the end, most missions don’t give you any rewards at all outside of XP. Unless you are a completionist there is zero reasons to stray outside of the main missions. This is really a bummer and most of Andromeda is just filler with no real rewards or pay-off.
There are also way too many things to keep track of. AVP missions, R&D, buying and selling, modding, unlocking cryo pods teams to bonuses. It’s just too much. AVP missions are pointless as you just send teams out to complete missions for you. There’s a co-op multiplayer section tied in here, but why bother? The rewards out pointless. Andromeda tries to create an economy and ultimately fails as it doesn’t need one. The game is too easy, so most of the weapons are useless. Once you get a level five weapon your good. I had one of each weapon and the mods are nice, they actually do help, but this meant I never needed to buy anything after the second world was finished. I mostly collected too many minerals on missions that I just R&Ded the weapon I wanted and that was it. I needed research points to research the weapon and then I could develop it. I also found most rare weapons as loot. By the time I got the third and fourth world, I stopped caring about all that and ignored it. I just continued to level up. Another thing I don’t like is elemental ammo is now expendable and you need to acquire it as it’s limited. It was hard to keep track of when I was using it as there’s no sound or icon flashing that shows me when it’s gone. The icon just disappears.
So the main reason you explore these worlds is to establish a base and to clear each world’s hazardous conditions by activating three Remnant monoliths and then the vault. The monoliths sometimes require you to solve a sudoku-type puzzle using glyphs. Yep, I sighed at that too. At least it’s a real puzzle, but why do we need these? They just slowed the game down and some are insanely difficult. Once you get into the vault you activate consoles to get a path to the purifier console then run out as the gas chases you. You do this about six or seven times and it gets more boring as you complete each one. One thing I did like was seeing each race and how they fit into the Andromeda Initiative. It really feels like a reboot of the series while keeping the core of it intact, sometimes too intact.
That leads me to the main reason why most people felt so engrossed in the original trilogy: The choices. The dialogue is now split up into five emotions and the binary moral system is gone, but each choice doesn’t really do anything. The only thing you can really control is who you form a relationship with. There is so much dialog and so many choices, but they mean nothing in the end and that is one of the major problems with the game itself. I enjoyed the story itself, and the personalities and politics of the races remained intact and were in full force here, but my character was probably better off just not having any dialog choices. That would have been a bold new move rather than keep a system that is hollow in the end. And essentially that’s what Andromeda is. A bunch of systems from the trilogy that is either just there because it’s familiar and don’t do anything new, or is just there for no particular reason. This leads me to the Galaxy Map. BioWare just can’t get it right, even four games later. Sure, you are actually on a map this time and can zoom across the system and it’s pretty cool for the first few times, then you want to skip it after that. It’s slow and uninteresting after a while, and there’s no reason to explore most planets outside of reading their description. Sometimes you can launch a probe when Suvi announces an anomaly, but that’s it. So while the map is visually more impressive, it’s still pointless.
The visuals are outstanding as the game uses EA’s Frostbite engine, but the game is horribly optimized. Frame drops happened mostly in cut scenes and in random areas. Sometimes dropping into single digits. It didn’t matter if it was on an overclocked RTX 2080 or an overclocked 1660ti. Both exceed the minimum requirements exponentially. The game still looks good with detailed textures and models and I can’t explain just how beautiful the worlds are. I really felt like a space pioneer when exploring them. Overall, Andromeda is only worth a play-through for hardcore fans. If you just pick up this game you’re going to get bored and not feel interested. It’s clearly geared towards fans of the series as a lot of events carry over from previous games and the knowledge of the races and events that took place to reflect a lot in this game.
Mass Effect was a big part of my teen years growing up. It was a massive sci-fi odyssey that let you explore planets, and BioWare created a giant world with lore that could rival Star Wars. Alien species with in-depth military and political backgrounds, and the amount of detail spread across the whole game that fully incorporated the lore and detail. Being able to talk to numerous species such as the Elcor, Hanar, Volus, or Asari about their individual lives or more galactic issues. It was fascinating and ground-breaking for the time. The facial animations, the graphics, the sheer scope of the game were unheard of. Fast forward over a decade later and it’s still impressive, but video games have evolved and so have action RPGs. The flaws are big red scores on the game, but it’s still fun to play through.
The game starts out like any other BioWare or Western RPG. You create a character, pick a class, and a background. Mass Effect’s character customization was never grand, and LE’s improved version helps a bit, but it’s still not very detailed. You can choose a pre-made character, but I chose to create from scratch. I picked a class that balances biotics and weapons and a female. Biotics are powers you can use in the game (and describes how humans become biotics in fascinating detail) and you’re off. You start out right off the bat learning that dialogue is a huge part of the game here. In fact, every choice you make shapes the ending and the outcomes of missions that carry across all three games. You can be Paragon or Renegade based on how you respond. There are usually three different levels. Nice, mean, and down the middle. One major complaint players had was the Renegade path was Shepard just being a complete asshole and nothing in between. It also doesn’t serve you to be neutral through the whole game either. This path can unlock dialogue options for either side that can change the tide of the entire game including making missions easier or harder.
Once you learn the ropes and get into your first mission you will learn how to play with the combat and shooting in the game. Mass Effect never had amazing combat, but the shooting here is slightly improved and is more enjoyable than it was before. You can move into cover, peek around ledges, sprint, and throw grenades. You can carry four weapons. Assault rifles, pistols, shotguns, and sniper rifles. Throughout the game, you can acquire crap tons of loot that allow you to mod the weapons in various ways as well as acquire new weapons and armor. This is essential to staying alive and you also need to manage your crews’ armament as well. Over the course of the game, you will meet various characters such as Wrex the Krogan, Liara the Asari, and Garrus the Turian. These characters are quite memorable and some even offer missions. I didn’t particularly care for Kaiden or Ashley as they were just boring humans honestly, and there is nothing exciting about their personalities and you only learn about their past through optional dialogue when visiting them on the Normandy (your ship) after each main story mission.
One of the major hub areas of the game is the Citadel. A giant spacecraft that trillions of aliens live on. There are various parts you can visit and can easily get around through a fast travel system. There are about a dozen missions to complete on the Citadel as well as vendors to visit. Some missions are given to you here to complete in space, but overall the Citadel isn’t a very enjoyable place to explore. Most of Mass Effect suffers from slow exploration, linear corridors, and various other problems. It’s a flaw of the times as the Xbox 360 wasn’t powerful enough for the vast open worlds we have now and there were also time constraints for development. Honestly, exploring in Mass Effect just isn’t very enjoyable. I only really liked the main story missions. Side missions are a bore fest with nothing truly gained outside of cash and loot and there’s too much of it. The game is so short that you will end up with millions of credits with nothing to spend it on. About halfway through I acquired the best gear just through completing missions and opening crates.
It’s a very unbalanced game difficulty-wise. I found the game very easy early on as acquiring loot so fast and quickly means you can kill everything in a couple of shots. This also led to me never really venturing outside of my pistol as my class specialized in that weapon. I nearly maxed out my level by the end of the game and there are so many different things to put points into that it feels unnecessary due to the short length of the game. All these biotic powers, weapons, mods, and classes for a game that can be finished in less than 20 hours? I wound up finishing everything in the game in about 33 hours. While this sounds strange that there would be so much RPG stuff in a short RPG, the game mostly just runs itself. I micromanaged my inventory a lot, but the game is so easy that I never worried about trying to find the best stuff. It basically falls into your lap.
That’s also not the weirdest thing about the game. The MAKO driving sections are a notorious and infamous chore and bore-fest. The vehicle has a mounted turret and shoots grenades, but there’s not much reason to use it outside of main missions. The vehicle is floaty and the worlds you drive on are insanely difficult to navigate. The terrain feels like it was made by a child who was given a terrain deformation editor and they went nuts. Nothing makes sense, there’s no logic. Just cheer cliffs and mountains on every single planet that are a pain to drive on. You can go around and discover hidden anomalies and metal deposits (these are for credits), but it’s such a chore and it’s boring. The first few planets are interesting, and it’s fun to feel like you’re exploring planets in space, but they’re completely empty. There are no other colonies or cities to visit outside of the Citadel itself. Just hours of empty driving and getting out to do a stupid puzzle to complete a few fetch quests.
Most side missions are given once you enter a new cluster on the Galaxy Map. You are looking at a solar system and can click on planets and you get a zoomed-in view of them. These are actually quite awesome and they are all different. You get info sheets on what type of planet it is and that part is really more fun to explore than actually landing on planets. Most clusters have one planet you can land on, and once you enter a cluster that has a side mission you will get an incoming message. Then you land, explore, find anomalies to complete the fetch quests, find deposits for credits, then you go into the same three generic interior buildings that are rotated to shoot something dead to complete the side mission. Maybe there’s one that involves dialogue to complete the mission. These interior levels are boring with just a few hallways and open rooms.
With that said, what’s the point of completing side missions then? Maybe completionists will want to for achievements, but it’s not needed to get the credits to buy weapons and armor. You end up getting all that stuff organically as you play anyways. The most enjoyable moments are the dialogue sections though and combat is fun for the most part. It’s just clunky and most eversything feels underutilized. However the story is fantastic and the majority of characters are memorable, and that’s Mass Effect’s strongest point. The world-building, the lore, the characters, the story, the writing, and everything involved in that.
The game looks good and the LE upgrade is definitely several steps up visually from the Xbox 360 original. There’s better lighting, higher resolution textures, more detailed models, and everything in between. The music in the series is also fantastic, and the PC graphics options are decent. There’s ultrawide screen support which is a huge plus in my book as well. Overall, Mass Effect 1 Legendary Edition improves mostly on the visuals and that’s it. You can’t fix the core gameplay too much. They tried to add sprinting, but it’s only for three seconds, so why bother? You can skip elevator rides, but only some of them, and interesting dialog takes place here, so again, what’s the point there? I also had physics issues, stuttering, slow down, and the game would randomly crash sometimes. Hopefully, this gets patched at some point.
If you can look past the awful MAKO missions, the clunky combat, overly easy difficulty, and the unbalanced loot system, the game is worth playing. The main story is short, and the side missions aren’t worth investing time into unless you want to complete everything. The story, lore, characters, and dialogue are what make the game so great, but it really hasn’t aged well over the years and feels like a time capsule of two generations ago.
Mass Effesct 2
Mass Effect had a lot of issues when it was released and many things needed to be balanced, tweaked and changed, and BioWare listened with Mass Effect 2. You can immediately see many improvements, especially right after playing the first game, but some issues were fixed in the wrong way or weren’t quite realized enough. As a sequel, the game is bigger, more in-depth, more fun, and definitely a much tighter experience overall.
One of the first things you will notice right away is the game plays more like a traditional cover-based third-person shooter. The shooting is tighter, the weapons are more satisfying to shoot, and the cover system is a lot better. One of the first major changes in the implementation of ammo in form of thermal clips. I know in Mass Effect 1 it was said that the weapons shave off pieces of metal and each gun has a small mass effect drive, but for some reason, thermal clips are now needed. You can pick thermal clips off of dead enemies or around the levels, but you also now have more limited use of weapons in your class. Each class can use specific weapon types. The game also ditched the traditional loot system in favor of set upgrades that you acquire throughout the game for everything. Each weapon has 5 levels of damage you can upgrade to, there are biotic upgrades, but your biotic powers are now set in stone based on class. Once you pick your class your weapons, biotic powers, and even ammo type you can use are all permanent. Some people didn’t like this and felt it was the opposite direction of endless, mostly useless, loot.
I actually felt this was an improvement as BioWare went with a more traditional cover shooter system so they took out most of the RPG elements outside of adding stat points to one of your four or more powers based on your level. I chose to use any weapon type, but I couldn’t use sub-machine guns. I also had access to all ammo types which there are four of. This actually came in handy when dealing with certain enemy types as there is a wider variety of them. I used incendiary ammo for organic enemies and for Geth and mechs I used a disruptor ammo type. I felt the cryo was a bit useless, but I also had access to my two teammates’ powers as well and I could command them to use them at will. You can acquire new weapons by discovering them around areas, as mission rewards, or at shops sometimes. There aren’t many weapons in the game, so just be aware of that. At least they feel more unique instead of just a statistic change in a massive pile of crap. Shepard also moves faster in this game and the entire pace of the main missions, and side missions even are faster and more streamlined.
Another huge change is the level design. In the first game, the only unique areas were during the story missions and side missions were a boring hodgepodge of empty hallways that led to empty square rooms. At least in this game, there are more worlds to land on, about three times as many, and there are about twice as many teammates to acquire so that means more unique areas as well. Each teammate is a mission in itself to acquire them and then they each have their own mission to gain their loyalty and this is used to advance your romantic relationship with them. There just aren’t more worlds, but they feel more lived in. Sure, they’re still small and linear and cramped, but the Citadel is what it was in ME1, you’re now just on three levels of the wards and the shops. There are aliens everywhere the backdrops look gorgeous, there are more ambient sound effects, and it feels great…for the first visit. The game is still very static and I wish alien positions would switch up or more random events would happen. Nothing ever changes and every NPC is glued to that spot forever. It still feels good to be in these areas and the extra detail everywhere is really noticeable.
Side missions are now acquired during main missions or other side missions, you might find a datapad that has a mission, or you will find messages on your personal terminal. The navigation of the galaxy map has greatly improved as well. All missions are now shown on the galaxy map and there are bubbles on each nebula or cluster with the name of the mission. You can now directly control the ship on the map, but it’s honestly pointless and feels half-baked. You have fuel and probes now and fuel is used to get across solar systems in a galaxy. You still need to use a mass relay to jump around the major clusters in the galaxy. The fuel feels stupid as that’s all it’s used for and probes are the answer to taking away the MAKO and finding resources.
Yes, the MAKO is gone, Hallelujah!, but now you are stuck with another mundane chore: Scanning planets for resources. There are five resources needed for upgrades with Element Zero being the rarest. Most of your Eezo is acquired on missions in containers rather than planets. What you have to do is hold down a button to scan the planet and a bar graph will spike high when there’s a strong amount of an element in that spot. It’s incredibly tedious and feels like a chore and there’s zero fun in it. Sure, you can acquire a better scanner later, as each crew member you recruit has a major upgrade to offer the Normandy, but it doesn’t make things better. What’s more annoying are the limited probes. Why? I can only get more at a fuel depot and those are only near mass relays. So, if I’m in a system that has no depot I have to travel back on the map and fuel up. Just give me unlimited fuel and probes! This limit makes no sense. I also don’t like how there’s no zoomed-in view of each planet like there was in the first game. It’s just a small ball on a screen. At least each planet has a unique description.
While the galaxy map is slightly improved it introduces new issues, the dialogue system hasn’t changed a bit. Shepard is a little less of an ass in the Renegade options, but the binary moral system is really crippling as the game tries so hard to be extreme on either end. There are now some quick-time events during certain scenes that allow you to perform a Paragon or Renegade action that can boost that meter, but at least the smaller choices in conversations now add a little bit too. The top, middle, and bottom responses are good to evil in respective order and you will get maybe two points for responding nicely even in parts of the conversations that don’t matter. Sometimes you can win an entire dialog-driven scene by having your moral polarized more on one side, but I will give BioWare credit for their continuity. Every action you did in the first game reflects whether it’s a crew member that died to a small side mission and you just get a message about it later. I noticed every action I did in the first game unfold and take hold here and these actions also had dire consequences.
The main story is still really short with only may half a dozen missions or so. The last three crew members are optional and there is a couple of crew members attached to DLC. Sadly, these crew members don’t have any dialog trees and their characters aren’t expanded upon enough. With that said, the new characters are really likable, memorable, and well-written. The expanded lore and world feel grand despite the game’s actual limited scope. I felt I had more control over the dialog, but the binary moral system is constricting in itself and is one of the main issues I have with the whole series. The game is about as long as the first, but it feels more satisfying as you aren’t spending 10+ hours driving around in a boring MAKO. I finished almost everything in about 35 hours and it feels solid and thorough. Less filler was scrapped for more actual content.
The Legendary Edition upgrades are mostly visual and they look great. The game is several steps up over the first game visually and the voice acting has improved a bit. There are more scripted events, cut-scenes, and animations. But the same 3-second sprint still exists which is annoying. Overall, Mass Effect 2 is so much better than the first in every way. The story feels grander, and the Collector’s are a new formidable enemy, more questions are answered that you actually care about, but also more questions are raised and the game ends on a cliff-hanger. I liked having to choose teammates to do certain things on the final Suicide Mission as some might die, but you don’t know in what situation or how, sometimes it’s not even the team member you actually pick who might die, but yes team members die at the end no matter what you do, it’s just a matter of who. I loved every minute I was in the game and couldn’t put it down.
Mass Effect 3
Here it is. The finale to one of the largest video game sci-fi epics ever created. It’s a huge undertaking and when Mass Effect 3 first launched it became infamous for its disappointing ending that basically had to be rewritten and patched back in. This is it. The final push against the Reapers and any other enemies that stand in Shepard’s way. The game focuses heavily on shooting and veers more away from a traditional RPG, but also has a more focused mission structure with a lot of writing and dialog with choices that mean even more than they ever did before.
The main focus of the game is to now gain War Assets towards defeating the Reapers. This is your main goal and what all main and side missions will give you in the end. You have a minimum meter and can’t engage the final mission until you’ve met this bar. This is all based on a score and it’s broken down based on what you have done. All main missions give you the largest chunk as your next big goal is to basically figure out what to do with each species that we have learned about up until now. The krogan and turian conflict, the krogan genophage, the quarians, the rachni, and the geth. All questions are answered and each main mission focuses on the main characters that either survived during Mass Effect 2 or just in general. Dealing with each and every major issue with all species is pretty incredible and cool. It feels right that everything led up to these huge decisions.
One of the first noticeable things is the improved combat. It’s more cinematic and feels closer to something akin to Gears of War. Infinite sprint, finally, with snappier cover mechanics, dodge and roll mechanics, and the guns feel more tweaked, unique, and satisfying to shoot. This feels like a proper third-person shooter now with some RPG stats tacked on. However, despite the more unique weapons which include a loadout bench and each weapon can have two mods attached, the game is still too easy. I rarely ever died and when you fully upgrade a weapon to level five everything dies in a couple of bullets. I wound up finding preferences for how the gun feels over how much damage it can do. I feel there are way too many weapons for such an easy system and every enemy feeling like cannon fodder. While there are now only Reaper enemies and Cerberus enemies, they repeat often and get boring to shoot. I was never afraid of any situation and I could even stand out in the open most of the time and just mow everything down without a scratch. While the combat feels great it’s not challenging and all the effort feels almost wasted.
Once again you command the Normandy ship and its layout has changed once again. It’s lost more streamlined and you no longer have to walk around talking to everyone hoping to unlock the next relationship stage. You only acquire five squadmates this time and most you already have met before. I really felt no need to walk around the ship anymore except inviting people to my cabin to advance a relationship. You are informed when someone wants an invite so the whole relationship thing is better and streamlined. The game switched focus from a lot of planets to visit for side missions to just very unique and cinematic main missions with a few side missions here and there. There really aren’t many. There are a ton of main missions and it keeps the pace going. Most side missions for acquiring war assets come in the form of probing planets. Don’t worry, it’s not as tedious as ME2 as this time you just probe the flashing spot on the planet and get your asset. And very rarely do you ever land on a planet for something. This allows you to solely focus mostly on main missions and map exploration which is pretty much the same as ME2.
The map removes needing probes and just has fuel which I still don’t really get. Now that the Reaper threat is imminent you can scan on the map as you fly around to find hidden assets. Sometimes this will alert the Reapers and they will swarm you on the map and you usually have to escape and come back. So, once again, the map is improved ins some ways and hindered in others. Never did BioWare really gets this system down working flawlessly. The only place you can now visit off-world is the Citadel and nowhere else. It’s also been streamlined as you visit different areas again. There’s a central elevator that takes you around to the five different levels and it’s mostly used for war assets acquisition. You overhear people talking and you then need to go to that system on the map and probe a planet for the thing they’re looking for. Sometimes is something you pick up on the main mission, but sadly these can be easily missed and there’s no way to go back if you do.
I found the binary moral system hindering once again as it matters here more than ever. It still unlocks certain actions during scenes and dialog options during important scenes, but I don’t like being either really nice or really mean. There’s no in-between and after going through three games like this it’s really annoying and holds things back. It feels so black and white here that I almost predicted what outcome would happen if I chose a certain response. Other than that the ending itself was satisfying, and you can replay the final scene and go through your options to see different outcomes. I didn’t like how I couldn’t get a detailed epilogue of what happened to each surviving crewmate and my romantic partners. You get concept art stills and Hackett giving a speech at the end (doesn’t spoil anything) and it felt pretty generic in the end. Like a fizzle and hiss rather than a huge emotional finale.
The visuals in ME3 are better than ever with insane details in the backgrounds and overall detail of the game. I found zero crashes and glitches with this game as with ME1 and ME2 I did. I did actually find one glitch where I fell through a floor, but I think it was my own fault that time. I did also find the DLC in ME3 kind of weird. There’s one DLC that’s all about comedy and stopping a clone of Shepard. You get an apartment that you can…deck out? Why? It’s not like this is a game I want to spend time in a player home in. I can buy furniture and stuff, not very exciting and completely useless. This DLC also has more mini-games in the form of an arcade and is basically an entertainment strip mall. While I enjoyed the funny one-liners and overall humor that the main games lack, this added feature was super strange.
Overall, Mass Effect 3 improves on giving you more cinematic story missions, less filler, improved combat, and bigger choices than ever before. You really feel like all of your actions from the past have caught up with you for better or worse. While BioWare still can’t seem to nail down combat and the galaxy map well enough, it works. Combat feels great, but it’s way too easy and thus the time and effort spent on creating so many unique weapons and mods is a complete waste. Why bother when I can stand there and mow down every enemy with the same weapon through the whole game? There’s no incentive to mix up the weapons and experiment. With the ending being iffy and the DLC being kind of weird, I enjoyed my time with ME3 but also felt the flaws were glaringly obvious. It’s still a great ending to one of the greatest video game franchises ever made.
Legendary Edition Changes
The changes made for this release are nice, but a lot of effort felt only half-baked. You can now sprint anywhere in Mass Effect 1 and 2, but only for a few seconds, so why bother at all? The visuals are greatly improved in all three games, but a total remake would have been better. Why not take what Mass Effect 3 improves on and change these over into the other two games? Get rid of the MAKO levels entirely in ME1 and just drop me down into the side missions from the planet. Allow me to collect resources in some other as it’s only used to gain credits anyways. The Galaxy Map should have also been changed in ME1. While driving around the map wouldn’t benefit much it would at least fit into the rest of the game. Some might say it doesn’t leave the game as original as possible, but these features are widely unliked by fans.
Combat could have also been changed over from Mass Effect 3 into both games. While ME1 is more of a traditional RPG in terms of loot, why not scrap it entirely? There’s a lot of design questions to this game as it mostly feels like just a visuals overhaul and that’s it. At least the game runs well on modern systems and consoles and that’s what mostly counts. This also would have given the developers an opportunity to redo the ending of the series completely. Take the fan feedback from the last decade and use that to rebuild a better ending.
Here it is. The finale to one of the largest video game sci-fi epics ever created. It’s a huge undertaking and when Mass Effect 3 first launched it became infamous for its disappointing ending that basically had to be rewritten and patched back in. This is it. The final push against the Reapers and any other enemies that stand in Shepard’s way. The game focuses heavily on shooting and veers more away from a traditional RPG, but also has a more focused mission structure with a lot of writing and dialog with choices that mean even more than they ever did before.
The main focus of the game is to now gain War Assets towards defeating the Reapers. This is your main goal and what all main and side missions will give you in the end. You have a minimum meter and can’t engage the final mission until you’ve met this bar. This is all based on a score and it’s broken down based on what you have done. All main missions give you the largest chunk as your next big goal is to basically figure out what to do with each species that we have learned about up until now. The krogan and turian conflict, the krogan genophage, the quarians, the rachni, and the geth. All questions are answered and each main mission focuses on the main characters that either survived during Mass Effect 2 or just in general. Dealing with each and every major issue with all species is pretty incredible and cool. It feels right that everything led up to these huge decisions.
One of the first noticeable things is the improved combat. It’s more cinematic and feels closer to something akin to Gears of War. Infinite sprint, finally, with snappier cover mechanics, dodge and roll mechanics, and the guns feel more tweaked, unique, and satisfying to shoot. This feels like a proper third-person shooter now with some RPG stats tacked on. However, despite the more unique weapons which include a loadout bench and each weapon can have two mods attached, the game is still too easy. I rarely ever died and when you fully upgrade a weapon to level five everything dies in a couple of bullets. I wound up finding preferences for how the gun feels over how much damage it can do. I feel there are way too many weapons for such an easy system and every enemy feeling like cannon fodder. While there are now only Reaper enemies and Cerberus enemies, they repeat often and get boring to shoot. I was never afraid of any situation and I could even stand out in the open most of the time and just mow everything down without a scratch. While the combat feels great it’s not challenging and all the effort feels almost wasted.
Once again you command the Normandy ship and its layout has changed once again. It’s lost more streamlined and you no longer have to walk around talking to everyone hoping to unlock the next relationship stage. You only acquire five squadmates this time and most you already have met before. I really felt no need to walk around the ship anymore except inviting people to my cabin to advance a relationship. You are informed when someone wants an invite so the whole relationship thing is better and streamlined. The game switched focus from a lot of planets to visit for side missions to just very unique and cinematic main missions with a few side missions here and there. There really aren’t many. There are a ton of main missions and it keeps the pace going. Most side missions for acquiring war assets come in the form of probing planets. Don’t worry, it’s not as tedious as ME2 as this time you just probe the flashing spot on the planet and get your asset. And very rarely do you ever land on a planet for something. This allows you to solely focus mostly on main missions and map exploration which is pretty much the same as ME2.
The map removes needing probes and just has fuel which I still don’t really get. Now that the Reaper threat is imminent you can scan on the map as you fly around to find hidden assets. Sometimes this will alert the Reapers and they will swarm you on the map and you usually have to escape and come back. So, once again, the map is improved ins some ways and hindered in others. Never did BioWare really gets this system down working flawlessly. The only place you can now visit off-world is the Citadel and nowhere else. It’s also been streamlined as you visit different areas again. There’s a central elevator that takes you around to the five different levels and it’s mostly used for war assets acquisition. You overhear people talking and you then need to go to that system on the map and probe a planet for the thing they’re looking for. Sometimes is something you pick up on the main mission, but sadly these can be easily missed and there’s no way to go back if you do.
I found the binary moral system hindering once again as it matters here more than ever. It still unlocks certain actions during scenes and dialog options during important scenes, but I don’t like being either really nice or really mean. There’s no in-between and after going through three games like this it’s really annoying and holds things back. It feels so black and white here that I almost predicted what outcome would happen if I chose a certain response. Other than that the ending itself was satisfying, and you can replay the final scene and go through your options to see different outcomes. I didn’t like how I couldn’t get a detailed epilogue of what happened to each surviving crewmate and my romantic partners. You get concept art stills and Hackett giving a speech at the end (doesn’t spoil anything) and it felt pretty generic in the end. Like a fizzle and hiss rather than a huge emotional finale.
The visuals in ME3 are better than ever with insane details in the backgrounds and overall detail of the game. I found zero crashes and glitches with this game as with ME1 and ME2 I did. I did actually find one glitch where I fell through a floor, but I think it was my own fault that time. I did also find the DLC in ME3 kind of weird. There’s one DLC that’s all about comedy and stopping a clone of Shepard. You get an apartment that you can…deck out? Why? It’s not like this is a game I want to spend time in a player home in. I can buy furniture and stuff, not very exciting and completely useless. This DLC also has more mini-games in the form of an arcade and is basically an entertainment strip mall. While I enjoyed the funny one-liners and overall humor that the main games lack, this added feature was super strange.
Overall, Mass Effect 3 improves on giving you more cinematic story missions, less filler, improved combat, and bigger choices than ever before. You really feel like all of your actions from the past have caught up with you for better or worse. While BioWare still can’t seem to nail down combat and the galaxy map well enough, it works. Combat feels great, but it’s way too easy and thus the time and effort spent on creating so many unique weapons and mods is a complete waste. Why bother when I can stand there and mow down every enemy with the same weapon through the whole game? There’s no incentive to mix up the weapons and experiment. With the ending being iffy and the DLC being kind of weird, I enjoyed my time with ME3 but also felt the flaws were glaringly obvious. It’s still a great ending to one of the greatest video game franchises ever made.
Mass Effect had a lot of issues when it was released and many things needed to be balanced, tweaked and changed, and BioWare listened with Mass Effect 2. You can immediately see many improvements, especially right after playing the first game, but some issues were fixed in the wrong way or weren’t quite realized enough. As a sequel, the game is bigger, more in-depth, more fun, and definitely a much tighter experience overall.
One of the first things you will notice right away is the game plays more like a traditional cover-based third-person shooter. The shooting is tighter, the weapons are more satisfying to shoot, and the cover system is a lot better. One of the first major changes in the implementation of ammo in form of thermal clips. I know in Mass Effect 1 it was said that the weapons shave off pieces of metal and each gun has a small mass effect drive, but for some reason, thermal clips are now needed. You can pick thermal clips off of dead enemies or around the levels, but you also now have more limited use of weapons in your class. Each class can use specific weapon types. The game also ditched the traditional loot system in favor of set upgrades that you acquire throughout the game for everything. Each weapon has 5 levels of damage you can upgrade to, there are biotic upgrades, but your biotic powers are now set in stone based on class. Once you pick your class your weapons, biotic powers, and even ammo type you can use are all permanent. Some people didn’t like this and felt it was the opposite direction of endless, mostly useless, loot.
I actually felt this was an improvement as BioWare went with a more traditional cover shooter system so they took out most of the RPG elements outside of adding stat points to one of your four or more powers based on your level. I chose to use any weapon type, but I couldn’t use sub-machine guns. I also had access to all ammo types which there are four of. This actually came in handy when dealing with certain enemy types as there is a wider variety of them. I used incendiary ammo for organic enemies and for Geth and mechs I used a disruptor ammo type. I felt the cryo was a bit useless, but I also had access to my two teammates’ powers as well and I could command them to use them at will. You can acquire new weapons by discovering them around areas, as mission rewards, or at shops sometimes. There aren’t many weapons in the game, so just be aware of that. At least they feel more unique instead of just a statistic change in a massive pile of crap. Shepard also moves faster in this game and the entire pace of the main missions, and side missions even are faster and more streamlined.
Another huge change is the level design. In the first game, the only unique areas were during the story missions and side missions were a boring hodgepodge of empty hallways that led to empty square rooms. At least in this game, there are more worlds to land on, about three times as many, and there are about twice as many teammates to acquire so that means more unique areas as well. Each teammate is a mission in itself to acquire them and then they each have their own mission to gain their loyalty and this is used to advance your romantic relationship with them. There just aren’t more worlds, but they feel more lived in. Sure, they’re still small and linear and cramped, but the Citadel is what it was in ME1, you’re now just on three levels of the wards and the shops. There are aliens everywhere the backdrops look gorgeous, there are more ambient sound effects, and it feels great…for the first visit. The game is still very static and I wish alien positions would switch up or more random events would happen. Nothing ever changes and every NPC is glued to that spot forever. It still feels good to be in these areas and the extra detail everywhere is really noticeable.
Side missions are now acquired during main missions or other side missions, you might find a datapad that has a mission, or you will find messages on your personal terminal. The navigation of the galaxy map has greatly improved as well. All missions are now shown on the galaxy map and there are bubbles on each nebula or cluster with the name of the mission. You can now directly control the ship on the map, but it’s honestly pointless and feels half-baked. You have fuel and probes now and fuel is used to get across solar systems in a galaxy. You still need to use a mass relay to jump around the major clusters in the galaxy. The fuel feels stupid as that’s all it’s used for and probes are the answer to taking away the MAKO and finding resources.
Yes, the MAKO is gone, Hallelujah!, but now you are stuck with another mundane chore: Scanning planets for resources. There are five resources needed for upgrades with Element Zero being the rarest. Most of your Eezo is acquired on missions in containers rather than planets. What you have to do is hold down a button to scan the planet and a bar graph will spike high when there’s a strong amount of an element in that spot. It’s incredibly tedious and feels like a chore and there’s zero fun in it. Sure, you can acquire a better scanner later, as each crew member you recruit has a major upgrade to offer the Normandy, but it doesn’t make things better. What’s more annoying are the limited probes. Why? I can only get more at a fuel depot and those are only near mass relays. So, if I’m in a system that has no depot I have to travel back on the map and fuel up. Just give me unlimited fuel and probes! This limit makes no sense. I also don’t like how there’s no zoomed-in view of each planet like there was in the first game. It’s just a small ball on a screen. At least each planet has a unique description.
While the galaxy map is slightly improved it introduces new issues, the dialogue system hasn’t changed a bit. Shepard is a little less of an ass in the Renegade options, but the binary moral system is really crippling as the game tries so hard to be extreme on either end. There are now some quick-time events during certain scenes that allow you to perform a Paragon or Renegade action that can boost that meter, but at least the smaller choices in conversations now add a little bit too. The top, middle, and bottom responses are good to evil in respective order and you will get maybe two points for responding nicely even in parts of the conversations that don’t matter. Sometimes you can win an entire dialog-driven scene by having your moral polarized more on one side, but I will give BioWare credit for their continuity. Every action you did in the first game reflects whether it’s a crew member that died to a small side mission and you just get a message about it later. I noticed every action I did in the first game unfold and take hold here and these actions also had dire consequences.
The main story is still really short with only may half a dozen missions or so. The last three crew members are optional and there is a couple of crew members attached to DLC. Sadly, these crew members don’t have any dialog trees and their characters aren’t expanded upon enough. With that said, the new characters are really likable, memorable, and well-written. The expanded lore and world feel grand despite the game’s actual limited scope. I felt I had more control over the dialog, but the binary moral system is constricting in itself and is one of the main issues I have with the whole series. The game is about as long as the first, but it feels more satisfying as you aren’t spending 10+ hours driving around in a boring MAKO. I finished almost everything in about 35 hours and it feels solid and thorough. Less filler was scrapped for more actual content.
The Legendary Edition upgrades are mostly visual and they look great. The game is several steps up over the first game visually and the voice acting has improved a bit. There are more scripted events, cut-scenes, and animations. But the same 3-second sprint still exists which is annoying. Overall, Mass Effect 2 is so much better than the first in every way. The story feels grander, and the Collector’s are a new formidable enemy, more questions are answered that you actually care about, but also more questions are raised and the game ends on a cliff-hanger. I liked having to choose teammates to do certain things on the final Suicide Mission as some might die, but you don’t know in what situation or how, sometimes it’s not even the team member you actually pick who might die, but yes team members die at the end no matter what you do, it’s just a matter of who. I loved every minute I was in the game and couldn’t put it down.
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