Here we are, another year, another Assassin’s Creed game. Having to actually say this is just sad as Assassin’s Creed has always been a good series. The games are high quality, play well, and look amazing for their time, but when you release that same greatness over and over with only minor changes it can grow tiresome. I was personally done with AC when Black Flag was released. I just couldn’t get through it. I already played them all up until that point and I felt AC3 hit the series peak, but they had to keep going.
Syndicate doesn’t do much new, but as it’s the last of the “older AC style games” it does everything very well but is also a little too familiar. While we do get new characters and the continued “real-world” story of the Assassins vs the Templars, the most interesting part of any AC game is the historically accurate world you explore. This time its 19th century England, specifically the London area and surrounding cities. You play as two characters this time, Jacob and Eevie Frye who are rogue assassins that are trying to stop the Templar plot in London. The main villain is Starrick who is pretty decent and well hated, but overall, the actual story is not much to really care about as it drags on a bit too long and takes forever to really go anywhere. Most of the game is just interaction cut scenes on what to do for the current mission and very little progression overall. Eevie is trying to obtain the Shroud relic which grants eternal life and Jacob doesn’t believe in the relics and pieces of Eden and wants to just stop the Templar threat. Both characters play exactly the same minus a few skills, but Jacobs’s missions lead him on a separate path.
Assassin’s Creed has been slowly eeking in RPG elements over time and I hate them. It doesn’t belong in this game at all and it really shows here. The entire map is sectioned off with leveled areas up to level 9. Of course, story missions also require you to be at certain levels and the only way to level up is to complete missions and use your points in the skill tree. Once you acquired enough skills, you will level up. The grinding isn’t too bad here, but a few times the story missions didn’t give me enough XP to level up, so I had to end up liberating sections of the map. This is where the game really becomes formulaic, and you can see the series has hit a brick wall. Each side’s mission that requires you to liberate an area repeats throughout the game. The missions range from assassinating templars to bounty hunts that require you to kidnap the target dead or alive, then there are child labor camp liberations where you just have to assassinate the foreman and free the children, and there are gang strongholds. The gang in this game is the Blighters, and they all dress in red, so they stand out. You just need to kill everyone in these areas. Once you liberate all areas of the city, you then have to fight the gang leader. You get an opportunity to do it out in the open, but more often than not, the thugs will take you down, as there are so many of them. Whether you kill the leader or not, you have to challenge the gang to a stand-off and just eliminate a bunch of them in a closed-off area. Once that area is 100% liberated, you can recruit those green-dressed members to fight for you.
After you liberate your first two areas, these missions get old really fast, and I didn’t bother with the last two cities. Most of the main missions are pretty much this combined with just unique areas and circumstances. Kidnapping, assassinating, stealing, blowing things up, and of course, there are secondary optional objectives you can meet for more XP and money, but some of these just seem impossible to accomplish. It was fun to try and strive for these, but if I blew it, I didn’t bother restarting or anything. One new addition to the series is vehicles in the form of horse-drawn carriages. These drive okay for the most part but are pretty useless once you start unlocking more fast travel points by syncing up at high points. They drive okay, but there are a lot of physics glitches in this game, and often you’d see horses fly off into space or freak out and run off into the abyss.
Syndicate has a lot of great-looking outfits and items to unlock. Each character has an outfit, gauntlet, and sidearm to equip. Most of these have to be crafted or met at a certain level, and you can find them by meeting secondary objectives on missions, locked chests, or by just playing the game. I feel the game is far too small in scope to need RPG elements. Once you get to level 8, you can finish the game, and there’s no point in continuing to play anymore. The only reason you need to level up and get better equipment is to survive the story missions. I was able to finish the game in about 13 hours, and I still felt this dragged on. Without the grinding, the story takes about 6–8 hours to complete with 8 sequences. I enjoyed the story, and the Frye twins have great personalities, but overall it felt average and forgettable at best. They didn’t go through enough personal issues; they got away scot-free for going against the order’s rules, and overall, the entire Assassins Order played no part in this game. The missions felt like they were just stringing you along and barely had a story to tell as an excuse.
As it stands, when I finished the game, I felt the side stuff was pointless and boring. I enjoyed the unique story missions the most, and yes, acquiring skills is just fine, and the skill tree was actually useful. My characters felt more powerful as I leveled up, and it made doing certain things easier, like when Eevie can stay still and become invisible when she masters the Stealth Tree. There are crowd events to complete in each area, like stealth, kill a messenger, or scare some bullies, but these aren’t fun. They are just there for completionists and to pad hours onto a game. I felt no reward or accomplishment when just checking these boxes for items I wouldn’t even need to use. You can upgrade each piece of equipment once to add a stat, but this is mostly for melee combat. Which, in fact, is terrible. It tries to be like Batman Arkham’s combat system, where you mash one button and then counter or break defense. When the enemy’s health bar flashes yellow, you can press the parry button, and when the health bar is gray, you can break their defense. It doesn’t chain together smoothly, and half the time it felt unresponsive. Some of the kill animations are also way too long, and there’s a lot of clipping. While it feels and looks brutal, it’s just button mashing.
The overall movement and flow of Syndicate feel a bit janky. A lot of time, the character would hop around like a rabbit when I was trying to get down somewhere to hang on to a specific thing. A lot of the time, this blew missions, and I had to restart. You can free-run up or down with two separate buttons, but you also get a grappling line, and it doesn’t work as you think. You have to be directly under a building to grapple up, and you can grapple across rooftops, but it does come in handy for assassinating people in large open areas. The problem is that you can’t grapple back out quickly, as you must be right next to a building. This felt only half-useful most of the time. Other than this, the only side missions I enjoyed were with real-life people such as Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Dickens. These missions are always enjoyable in AC games, but the same repetitious missions repeat here as well.
The game does look absolutely stunning, though. For the time, the game was ahead in terms of technical achievements for graphics, and no GPU could run the game at maxed-out settings and 60FPS, but now that it’s been five years, I can see why. The Anvil engine is horribly optimized and runs poorly on GPUs that are four generations newer. I had to turn anti-aliasing completely off on an overclocked RTX 2080 as I couldn’t get 60FPS with everything else maxed out at 1440p. That’s the game’s fault, not my system. When you do get it running well, it looks stunning, even today. Great lighting effects, outfits that look gorgeous, and beautiful recreations of historical buildings. I enjoyed exploring London. However, the facial animations and models on everyone, but the main characters, looked horrendous, and the same five-character models repeated. The game is a little rough here and there, and I also found on my 1660ti system that the camera had jerkiness to it despite hitting 60FPS with everything maxed out and anti-aliasing set to FXAA (otherwise you lose 20FPS and it’s not worth the cost).
As Syndicate stands now, the series really needs to reboot or go back to simpler times when you just had a nice narrative and a few things to collect. Outside of the mediocre story and somewhat fun story missions, the side missions are repetitive, formulaic, and get old fast. There are only chests and newspapers to tear down walls, and even these are old as they have been in every single game except the first one up to this point in time. You can make beautiful, historically accurate worlds, and you can have state-of-the-art graphics, but in the end, the series will get stale and tiresome fast.
Let’s get one thing straight: Assassin’s Creed needed a reboot, for sure. Syndicate was by no means bad, but the only thing really changing were the locales, and the gameplay was getting stale. Origins ups the ante with the largest game yet, but…also adds RPG elements? RPGs aren’t something I associate with Assassin’s Creed. At least the story is entertaining and the new settings are daring and beautiful all at the same time, but do the RPG elements hurt more than help, and is the series going to find itself stuck in a new rut it can’t get out of?
You play Bayek of Siwa, a man who had his son murdered by The Order of the Ancients, and he is on a journey of vengeance and revenge. Bayek is actually a great character with a good amount of personality and spirit. He’s a likeable character and isn’t just hellbent on revenge. He changes over the course of the story, becoming even colder and bitter towards the end (not a spoiler), but this is also the story of how the Assassins came to be. The origins of the Creed we have all come to love. This was also long before the Templars stepped in too.
One of the first things you will notice in the game is the size of the world. It’s incredibly massive, and sadly, too massive. Almost two-thirds of the map isn’t explored during the story and is reserved for just going around, finding collectibles, and doing side quests. There are dozens upon dozens of side quests, and these are needed to grind levels. That’s the first major damper on this game. Yes, it has RPG elements, but you need to grind just to complete the story, which is not ideal. The cap here is level 44, and thankfully the first twenty or so levels come fast. By the eighth hour, I was already level twenty, but it slowed down a lot after that. You need to be at least level 33 by the end of the game, and those last 15 levels are a serious grind as missions are the fastest way to level up, and most don’t grant more than 3,000 XP. You would think that higher-level missions would give more XP, but the game chose quantity instead. The higher you get, the more you need to complete to move on. I hate this so much, and it feels like an absolute chore.
The combat is refreshed and isn’t a total parry fest like previous games were. You have light and heavy attacks, as well as a block and parry button. It works well enough, but it’s still just button-mashing in the end. You get an adrenaline bar that can be used for powerful attacks that are unlocked in the skill tree. Ranged weapons are added in the form of bows. There are various types of weapons and bows. Two-handed and one-handed weapons, plus various bows with different ammo types. These come in handy when hunting animals and trying to take out guards from a distance. However, your level will impede one-hit assassination kills and how much damage your bow can do.
You do get the hidden blade in this game about a fourth of the way through the story. Assassinating is the same as usual and just as satisfying. Leapfrogging from guard to guard is fun when you are at least two levels below theirs. The game is tightly locked around this two-level plateau, and if you are three levels or more below the enemies, they are almost impossible to kill. It makes the game more frustrating, as you just want to take these guys out, but you need to come back when you level up so you don’t die all the time. The whole RPG system just hampers Assassin’s Creed‘s fundamental gameplay, which was best when you could just go into any fight and take them out with stealth if you were good enough.
You can loot weapons off of enemies, chests, and other places and even upgrade them at the blacksmith, but I found this useless as I was getting a constant stream of better weapons by just playing. I didn’t even really need to buy anything either. It’s just a wasteful system, which means I didn’t really need any money either. I just refilled my arrows when needed, sold stuff to empty out my inventory, and maybe bought outfits for Bayek, which all look great. You don’t get any armor in this game, as your health and damage are all determined based on your level. You can hunt animals for their skins to upgrade your hidden blade and overall armor rating, but that’s about it. I didn’t even bother doing this, as hunting is just another chore added to the game that isn’t really needed. One of the few things the series scaled back on was collectibles. There are hidden scrolls, Ptolemy statues to destroy, and, of course, viewpoints to sync up with, but most of the collectibles are in the form of taking out guard outposts and looting them. You need to kill the captain as well to make the fort takedown complete. I found this boring and tiresome after I did a few and just skipped them entirely.
There are some entertaining side quests, and most are different, but the majority require you to either rescue someone, as you can carry them out of a camp and put them on your horse, or assassinate someone. These got old quickly, and even the dialog in between didn’t matter much. Some missions have you “investigating” an area, but again, just filler to cram on more hours to the playtime. The most enjoyable part of the game was climbing up to viewpoints and doing story missions. Naval battles are also back, but only during a few scripted events, and they are fun, sure, but it’s nothing different than previous games. You play as Bayek’s love, Aya, during these missions, and they mostly consist of just taking down ships with different life bars. There’s no upgrading, no customization, or anything like that. You get this set ship and controls for about three missions. You can use boats in the main game, but they are just used as transportation and nothing more, as there isn’t a whole lot of water in Egypt.
I can’t deny that the story was entertaining, especially towards the end, but the game is just beautiful. Large, sweeping vistas of deserts and climbing the Pyramids of Giza are memorable and incredibly fun. However, a lot of the realism that was well-loved in previous games is gone. This isn’t a painstakingly recreated Egypt with buildings that are realistic down to the brick. It’s a hodgepodge of real-life objects thrown into a somewhat realistic-looking Egyptian landscape. The game recreates the biomes and environments of Egypt, but the map has large areas smashed together. While it flows well and looks pretty, I don’t particularly care for this. I like the smaller, more realistic, and historically accurate places. I liked reading about each building I discovered or a real-life person. Yes, there are real historical figures here like Cleopatra, Ptolemy, and Caesar, but they’re fictional recreations, and their backstories aren’t told anywhere. If this is sacrificed for larger, more open worlds, I just don’t want it. Assassin’s Creed is getting too big, and there are not enough interesting things within to fill it.
In the end, Origins‘ RPG system hampers the game at every turn. You have to stop advancing the story to level up with mostly repetitive side quests, which are filler to force you to explore the world. While the main story is really entertaining, I still didn’t care about Layla or the real-world stuff with Abstergo. You cut away maybe a few times from this, but that “side story” just doesn’t feel like it ever goes anywhere. Just keep me in the historical world, and that’s it. We don’t need the Animus; we don’t need Abstergo or any of the science to make an excuse to keep exploring various worlds. We don’t need the Apple of Eden or any other artifacts. Origins also has a poorly optimized engine with frequent slowdowns and AI issues everywhere. I even had plenty of physics glitches. Sure, it looks stunning, but there are problems here. The combat system is fine, but again, the skill tree doesn’t even help much here, as most of the skills felt pretty useless and I didn’t even need them. These systems were never needed in an Assassin’s Creed game. I don’t mind more side quests, but make them optional like they’re supposed to be. The RPG system is the worst thing to ever happen in the series, and sadly, it seems like it’s here to stay.
Man, I am completely exhausted. That’s the feeling you will get when trying to slog through this insanely beautiful yet equally insanely bloated mess of a game. I have a complete love-hate relationship with Odyssey. It’s been installed on my PC since it launched in 2018, and it’s taken me three years to finally get around to completing it. There is so much to digest and chew with this game that I don’t know where to even begin. I have a lot of negative things to say about this game and will probably go on a tirade about certain mechanics and systems the game has, but there is still something here to be enjoyed.
Let’s just start with the story in which Odyssey doesn’t really have a meaningful one. Unlike previous games where there was a hand-tailored narrative tightly woven between assassins and templars, this game seems to forget most of what Assassin’s Creed‘s makeup really is. The game features a seemingly generic male or female protagonist who is trying to bring their family back together after a tragic event that took place while they were children. Therein lies one of the first major issues with the game: the story has no meaning, takes way too long to unfold, and there are no characters worth caring about. The game features generic, dull voice acting with badly faked (I think it’s faked?) Greek accents with cookie-cutter models that repeat throughout the game. They are mannequin-like, stiff, and just boring. Gone are the well-thought-out historical characters we can grow to love, but instead Ubisoft thought it was cute to shove nearly every single major famous Greek person in this game and give them lifeless personalities and stale dialog to spew.
The second issue lies with the fact that this is an RPG and not really an action adventure anymore. In fact, assassinations take a major back seat in favor of head-on combat, which rolls into the level grinding and enemy leveling that plague this entire game. I miss the days when you could just do what you wanted when you wanted in an AC game, and that’s that. I miss the well-crafted and unique assassination levels, but instead, we get generic everything, as Odyssey is the epitome of quantity over quality in every single aspect of the game. There are a lot of layers to the gameplay loop in Odyssey, but let’s just start with forts and restricted areas in general. The combat itself is fine. It’s slightly tweaked from Origins, which I haven’t played much of yet. However, it’s boring, dull, and repetitive, like the rest of the game. You get to assign four abilities from the skill tree for ranged and melee, respectively. There is a heavy and light attack, and most of the game requires you to perform a perfect dodge, so time slows down and you can get hits in to fill your ability bar. Each segment is needed for various abilities to activate, and you will rely heavily on this. The combat looks good and feels fine, but it’s just the usual ACbutton mashing, dodging, and parrying fest we’ve grown tired of.
There are probably hundreds of them in this game, and that’s not an exaggeration. Most side quests, some story missions, and the Cult of Cosmos main/side storyline make you go into a lot of these. This was fine back in the early days, as these areas felt unique and well-thought-out, but here it’s just a random splattering of various enemy types. Each fort or restricted area has a variety of things you can do to “complete” that area. Burn supplies, steal loot, kill a leader to bring that area’s stronghold down (which, as far as I know, doesn’t mean anything), and kill various types of leaders. Some have specific mission-based items. The issue here is the whole RPG/leveling thing, as assassinations now require you to be at a higher level before you can one-hit kill them like in past games. So, taking down an entire fort can be a slog when you have to fight every enemy head-on.
It doesn’t help that these areas don’t feel well put together, with hardly any cover to hide inside most, and it takes forever to become anonymous. You can’t blend in as well as you could back in the older games. It either doesn’t get caught by the awful AI that seems to make enemies just wander around aimlessly with no set patrol pattern or fight it out head-on. That’s your only option. I miss the satisfaction of running through a restricted area and just assassinating everyone with a leap-frog type of momentum. It was incredibly satisfying to get everyone without blowing the horn, but in Odyssey, this rarely ever happened. The game keeps the entire world either two-level above or below you, no more or less. You can’t go back to a previous area at level 5 and just slaughter everything in sight. Eventually, that area levels up too.
If that doesn’t sound bad enough, the main story missions are locked away behind these level walls. I would then have to go do maybe a character-world mission to go up two levels to finish the next few story missions. This would normally be okay, but I don’t care about a single character in this game! For such a massive and detailed open world, everything in it is so boring and lifeless. I only kept playing to explore the world and nothing else. Let’s also not forget the “real world” that AC games keep shoving in our faces. There’s maybe an hour of this at the most, and I never went back during the main story. The Cult of Cosmos is where most of the “real-world” jumps are, and yes, I could care less about those too. Can we please just completely cut out this real-world Abstergo nonsense already? It was okay with Desmond Miles in the Altair/Ezio saga, but now it’s just stupid and silly.
Honestly, the game is mostly just overbearing and exhausting to explore and ingest. I tried the old strategy of going through each area and doing all the side missions and quests, but that became incredibly boring fast. The entire game comes to a screeching halt as you constantly run into leveling walls and need to stop one mission to do another to get certain items or complete repetitive “kill all of these” missions to get the XP to level up. The majority of XP comes from completing missions. Discovering new areas, killing enemies, and other things like this don’t ever give you enough to level up. I just wish this whole RPG system was gone, as it really hurts this game badly. Then there’s the loot system with armor and weapons, and you can engrave them and upgrade them, but this was a completely useless system as I was constantly getting new loot from dead enemies that were at higher levels. This was a completely wasted system and was poorly implemented.
I also haven’t even gotten into the ship battles. This has become boring as well, and the first 15 hours of the game are a serious chore as you have to sail around a lot to get to new areas, where you need to hit every synchronization point you can find so you can fast travel around the map. I didn’t have a sync point in every major area until maybe 20 hours into the game. It’s that much of a grind. Ship battles are exactly like they have always been. Shoot javelins or arrows to bust down a ship; you can board it; you can also use flame arrows or ram it. That’s pretty much it. It’s very basic, dull, and underwhelming, despite how nice the ships handle and how fantastic the water looks. You can upgrade your ship and assign lieutenants that add stat boosts and change your crew theme, but this mostly seems pointless as I spent almost no time in the water once I could fast travel around the map. This is mostly used for dull missions that require taking down certain ship types, and that’s really it.
Through the first 15 hours of the game, all I wanted to do was constantly quit. I felt like I was making progress, and then suddenly I had to grind 2-3 levels to get the next set of story missions, and that required completing dull side missions of all kinds. There are notice boards in every major town that offer these, apart from the ones just sitting out in the world. There are also timed missions that expire like this is some MMO, and boy are these the absolute worst of the bunch. I honestly can’t say I ever felt like the game was actually a lot of fun. The forts are probably the worst part of the game, and sadly, it was the opposite in the past. I wound up just jumping in, killing the person I needed for the mission or item, and jumping out. I stopped completing forts about five hours in.
Traveling around on horseback is also boring, as you have to clear large swaths of land before finally getting enough fast travel points, and I just can’t express enough how big this game is. It’s too big and bloated for its own good. Most people will probably never finish this game, as it takes a minimum of 30 hours to grind through the story. I spent 15 hours just trying to complete everything and gave up in the end. The final system I want to mention is the mercenary system. Committing crimes will get you a bounty on your head, and mercenaries will come after you. You can defeat them to climb the tiers, but finishing this requires being level 50, which is the cap, and it’s not worth it. There are at least 50 odd mercenaries to kill, and you will end up killing at least half by the end of the game just because they are there and in the way. Thankfully, you can pay off your bounties on the map to get them off your back, so it’s completely optional.
Overall, Odyssey is just too damn big and too generic to be considered a memorable game. Sure, the game wonderfully recreates ancient Greece with many amazing monuments, buildings, statues, and towns, but they all start looking the same after a while. There are far too many forts to conquer; the leveling requires way too much grinding of boring side missions and lame quests, and it becomes incredibly overwhelming and exhausting even as soon as five hours in. There just aren’t any interesting characters, and the story is fairly simple and dull. I couldn’t care about anything in this game except exploring new areas, because that was at least fun. Naval combat hasn’t evolved much, there’s a useless equipment upgrade system, and assassinations have taken a back seat over combat. Hell, you don’t even get the hidden blade in this game. The skill tree, which I didn’t talk about, is also a mix of overreliance on certain abilities, as they do large amounts of damage, and not caring about a good majority of others. It’s a poorly balanced skill tree, and I didn’t use 90% of them. The entire game is just unbalanced and a boring grind, and most of the game feels like a chore with no pay-off. I hope to eventually try out the DLC, as it seems more entertaining, but we will see.
So, it sounds like I hate the game, but I don’t. I enjoyed the feeling of accomplishment when I finally reached that next level and could move on. Most of the fun was literally just exploring the land, and no, not even looting stuff that I came across, as I skipped most of it. The world is beautiful, and it looks amazing, but there’s so much here that’s just generic and pointless. This is my least favorite AC game to date (alas, I haven’t played any games between Black Flag and Origins, so that might change). If Ubisoft had cut the game down even by half and removed the RPG system, this game could have been much more than the sum of its parts. Lastly, I’d like to mention that the engine is poorly optimized and runs like garbage on hardware well above the recommended specs. Even after numerous patches, there’s a slowdown everywhere.
Beautiful indie games are something that comes only once in a while. When you think about games like Journey, Limbo, Inside, Braid, Monument Valley, and Flower, These are memorable games that most core gamers know of and look up to when it comes to quality indie games and what defines an indie game. Omno tries this but doesn’t quite reach that height for several reasons.
So, when it comes to these minimalistic indie games, they usually try to tell a story with no voice acting through the music and action of the protagonist. Games like Journey and Inside pulled this off amazingly well, and I even remember tearing up a bit with Journey despite no written or spoken dialog being present. Omno has some great music and tries to pull off the adventurous fast-paced snowboarding/gliding on linear pathways with epic music and opening up to a beautiful vista kind of like how Journey did, but it doesn’t quite work here. Once you land, you get the camera ripped from you, and your little guy walks up to the vista, and the camera pans around. That detracts from the user’s perspective and takes away that epic experience. Diving into the open area without any cuts adds to the sense of exploration and discovery because now I don’t quite know where I landed, but if I get a camera cut, it kind of ruins the surprise.
Most of what Omno consists of is repetitive puzzle-solving in open areas that all play out exactly the same. There are white orbs you must collect to unlock the final puzzle to move on, but there are optional things you can do to get 100% in the area, which isn’t hard. I was able to play 100% of the game on my first try without a walkthrough. You get an area map once you get to the waypoint, and this shows where the orbs are. Each area has about five orbs that require gathering white cubes from animals and plants around the area. Once you have enough, this unlocks one of the five orbs. You then have a few books to find that have a dialog about another creature going on their pilgrimage. Some orbs require platforming puzzles, moving blocks, or shuffling things around. It’s very easy, and I found almost no challenge in these puzzles. You do unlock new abilities as time goes on, such as teleporting to certain waypoints, surfing on your staff, and dashing.
There is a small sense of progression, and each new area is beautiful and looks great. However, I felt like it was a chore by the tenth one because I knew exactly what was coming up. Find five orbs, gather the cubes for that one orb, find the books, solve at least three puzzles, etc. It became predictable, and there is really no story or character development between them, so the game relies on pretty graphics and whimsical music to keep you going. The platforming and controls work okay most of the time, but I felt dashing was a bit hard to control, and landing was a bit slippery. Many times, I slid off a cliff or block just to start over again.
If the game were just a linear adventure traveling through these valleys, I feel it would be a better and more memorable experience. Having a dozen levels that play out exactly the same for literally no reason is boring and a chore, despite how pretty the game looks. Maybe four or five pieces spread out between more eye candy would have been better for this type of game, but what’s here turns into a slog towards the end. I still recommend the game as it can be finished in less than four hours and it is charming to look at and explore, but just be prepared for repetitive level design and unchallenging puzzles. The story is pretty much nonexistent, and there’s no type of character development even through actions. Omno (I think that’s his name?) has a flying axolotl-type creature flying around with him, and the creature is sick, maybe? At the beginning of some levels, he picks him up, and the thing looks like it’s dying. I honestly don’t even know.
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, 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 it’s actually part of the story. With this occult worship of a god of lust, they partake in orgies, torture, maiming, dismemberment, and all sorts of horrible acts. The game is incredibly violent and disturbing. You have sex with mutilated bodies and 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 the extreme pleasure of being transported 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, no one 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 use a lever to move a block, but mostly they get boring. Nothing really happens on 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 they 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 designs. 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 findings.
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, 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 is just rooms with two sex scenes each, a few not in the game, and that’s just there, I guess. It 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.
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, and 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 it. Once you land on 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 infinitely 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 that while each weapon looks unique, it doesn’t feel too unique. A shotgun feels like a shotgun, and an assault rifle feels like an assault rifle. They just picked a center lane for each weapon type and stuck with that. Games like Gears of War have weapons that have their own unique personalities. They are almost characters 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 a generic, boring robot. 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, 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 them 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 are 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 cryopods teams, and 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 are pointless. Andromeda tries to create an economy but 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, you’re 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 so 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 the most rare weapons as loot. By the time I got to the third and fourth worlds, I stopped caring about all that and ignored it. I just continued to level up. Another thing I don’t like is that 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 liked 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 keeping a system that is hollow in the end. And essentially, that’s what Andromeda is. A bunch of systems from the trilogy are either just there because they’re familiar and don’t do anything new, or they’re 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 descriptions. 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 reflects 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, and 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, and 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 crew’s 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 by 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 everything 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 Effect 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 was 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, of which there are four. This actually came in handy when dealing with certain enemy types, as there are 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, and I could command them to use them at will. You can acquire new weapons by discovering them around areas, as mission rewards, or sometimes at shops. 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 is even 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, and 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 their 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 morals polarized more on one side, but I will give BioWare credit for its continuity. Every action you take in the first game reflects whether it’s a crew member who died on a small side mission and you just get a message about it later. I noticed every action I took 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 maybe half a dozen missions or so. The last three crew members are optional, and there are 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 from 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 cliffhanger. 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, which 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 it 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 your main and side missions will give you in the end. You have a minimum meter and can’t engage in 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 and 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 the fact that 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 feels 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 of you already have met before. I really felt no need to walk around the ship anymore except to invite 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, but 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 on main missions and map exploration, which is pretty much the same as in ME2.
The map removes the need for probes and just has fuel, which I still don’t really get. Now that the Reaper threat is imminent, you can scan 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 in some ways and hindered in others. Never did BioWare really get 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 asset 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 it’s 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 (which 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 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’s home. I can buy furniture and stuff, which is 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 game lacked, this added feature was super strange.
Overall, Mass Effect 3 improves by 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 to 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 from others, as they’re only used to gain credits anyway. 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 disliked by fans.
Combat could have also been changed from Mass Effect 3 in both games. While ME1 is more of a traditional RPG in terms of loot, why not scrap it entirely? There are a lot of design questions about this game, as it mostly feels like just a visual overhaul, and that’s it. At least the game runs well on modern systems and consoles, and that’s what mostly counts. This would also 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, which 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 it 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 your main and side missions will give you in the end. You have a minimum meter and can’t engage in 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 and 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 the fact that 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 feels 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 become more streamlined, and you no longer have to walk around talking to everyone, hoping to unlock the next relationship stage. You only acquired five squadmates this time, and most of you have already met before. I really felt no need to walk around the ship anymore, except to invite people to my cabin to advance a relationship. You are informed when someone wants an invitation, so the whole relationship thing is better and more 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, but 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 on main missions and map exploration, which is pretty much the same as in ME2.
The map removes the need for probes and just has fuel, which I still don’t really get. Now that the Reaper threat is imminent, you can scan 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 in some ways and hindered in others. Never did BioWare really get 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 asset 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 it’s 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 (which 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 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’s home. I can buy furniture and stuff, which is 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 game lacked, this added feature was super strange.
Overall, Mass Effect 3 improves by 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 was 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 the ammo type you can use are all permanent. Some people didn’t like this and felt it was the opposite 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, of which there are four. This actually came in handy when dealing with certain enemy types, as there are 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, and I could command them to use them at will. You can acquire new weapons by discovering them around areas, as mission rewards, or sometimes at shops. 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 is even 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, and 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 their 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 morals polarized more on one side, but I will give BioWare credit for its continuity. Every action you take in the first game reflects whether it’s a crew member who died on a small side mission and you just get a message about it later. I noticed every action I took 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 maybe half a dozen missions or so. The last three crew members are optional, and there are 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 from 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 cliffhanger. 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 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 at the time. The facial animations, the graphics, and 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, as 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 and 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 it from scratch. I picked a class that balances biotics and weapons and is female. Biotics are powers you can use in the game (and it 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 a paragon or a renegade based on how you respond. There are usually three different levels. Nice, mean, and down the middle. One major complaint players had was that 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 crew’s armor 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 isn’t very enjoyable. I only really liked the main story missions. Side missions are a borefest 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 them on. About halfway through, I acquired the best gear just by 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 it 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 borefest. 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 look at the 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 to get a zoomed-in view of them. These are actually quite awesome, and they are all different. You get information 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, and 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 anyway. The most enjoyable moments are the dialogue sections, though, and combat is fun for the most part. It’s just clunky, and most everything 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, slowing 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, the 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 in 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 from two generations ago.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Yep! The fact that I forgot about this game until you made a comment proves that.