My 5 Gripes About Mass Effect

Mass Effect has been ruling my life for the past week. If my first impressions post wasn't any indication, I've really been taken with almost every aspect of this game, from the near-perfect blend of action and role-playing, to the engrossing pull of its narrative and cinematics. Like Oblivion before it, Mass Effect stands as a prime example of how to open up the traditionally hardcore genre of RPGs to a mainstream audience.

All is not perfect in the galaxy, however, as my numerous play sessions this week have uncovered more than a few black marks that as tarnished an otherwise superlative gaming experience. I give to you, in no particular order, my key complaints with BioWare's latest masterpiece.


Auto-Saving
I'm so grateful that this game has a save anywhere system. In fact, it's pretty much expected with a game like this that the designers would allow you to save your progress whenever you felt like it. Save checkpoints would frankly be moronic and would no doubt cause a black hole to open up beneath BioWare's headquarters to be swallowed up forever, never to be seen again, had they been foolish enough to go that route. The game also auto-saves your progress at certain points, oh, maybe once every 30 minutes or so.

Seriously, if you're going to bother implementing an auto-save system, can you at least by smart about it? How about an autosave before a big battle, or an autosave after you've hacked a bunch of storage lockers in a row and acquired all the sweet loot inside? No, you're not given those luxuries. In fact, the game practically forces you to manually save your game yourself, which becomes pain after a while since it breaks the flow of your game and takes you out of the story.

Thankfully, saving and loading games is a speedy affair, but I truly feel they could have done the autosaving mechanics so much better. Could there be an update for this in the works?


Sprinting/Storming is Broken
If you hold down the "A" button while you're moving, you can make Commander Shepard do a full dash and possibly fatigue himself. It's a useful move at times when you need to enter (or escape) a room quickly or get into cover without getting pegged too much by biotics or gunfire. My only problem with sprinting is it almost never works. IGN's review of pointed out how certain button functions disable for no reason whatsoever. While every other function has performed without any hitches for me, the sprinting button is consistently broken. It seems like I can only sprint once every mission or planet landing. Once I've used up my sprint, I get this fake Gears of War camera effect that gives you the impression that you're running faster, but you're not.

This is probably the biggest, ugliest technical issue with the game and I hope an update is in the works to get this patched up.


Game Manual is Useless
The days of the juicy, tome-like game manuals chock full of beautiful imagery and detailed instructions are pretty much the thing of the past, even for PC games. Console games have always had skimpy manuals in the box, but when you pick up an RPG, you sort of expect a little more meat on the bones since you're dealing with more complex game play mechanics.

Mass Effects manual is an atrocity. It's poorly organized, poorly ordered and doesn't contain enough useful information about combat, inventory management, leveling, control layout and skills. These are huge omissions, which wouldn't be a problem if there were some in-game tutorials. Unfortunately, Mass Effect's idea of a tutorial is to throw a tiny text pop-up onto the screen. Press A to clear the message, and that's it: the lesson is over.

This snafu qualifies the BioWare crew as some the dumbest smart guys ever in gaming. Either give us a quality game manual with useful information, or give us some well-integrated in-game tutorials. Please don't shaft gamers on both.


Thresher Maws
Need I say more?


RPG Elements Not as Deep as Expected
I'm not a role-playing elitist, but I don't feel the leveling and skills system in Mass Effect is all that deep. Sure, you can manage the skill point distribution of your entire squad of NPCs and acquire "specialty classes" in the course of the game. I was expecting a system that went a little deeper, something that accounted for base statistics like intelligence and strength and at the same time presented some sort of branching skill tree. As it is now, the skill system is very flat and linear. It doesn't take any time at all to max out a couple of your main skills and while you sometimes need to invest points in one skill area to unlock a new one, there isn't really a big sense of discovery or accomplishment. It literally feels like a RPG leveling system that was tacked on to an action game.

It's still possible to create different versions of a particular class. For example, you can make a Soldier that specializes in stealth and long-range firepower or a real close-range bruiser that excels in using the shotgun, melee attacks and heavy armor. I just wish there was more depth to the leveling system in general and hope they improve on that in the next two games in the trilogy.


Bonus Gripe: The film grain effect sucks and it's beyond me why that is enabled by default.

(Update)
Okay, so I had no idea OXM also had their own little 5 Things... critique of Mass Effect. No matter, as I wanted to correct myself regarding the sprinting/storming function. It's not broken, apparently, and I was merely just not noticing how it only activates when the game has entered "combat mode". After a few tests of this during one of my side quests to confirm this, I humbly retract my complaint... and replace it with a new one!

There seem to be only 2 or 3 template designs for the "dungeons" used on the side quest planets. Aside from being populated with slightly different enemies, these mercenary hideouts or research labs all boil down to the same couple of room layouts, right down to the positioning of the crates and combustible canisters. For a game of this caliber, this obvious use of templates is more than a little disappointing. Shame on you, BioWare.

Now excuse me while I go play some more...