MASSive

I have decided to hit the loyal readers with TWO posts since I have been away a while.
Alright, I picked up and finished Mass Effect. The first one, not the second. Wow…..this is all I can say.
I know I am probably behind the curve about this one, but I was just blown away by the graphics, the story, and the combat system! It’s all amazing. I will start at the beginning:
You start as Commander Shepard, which can be a female or male depending on your choice, who is sent to investigate a distress call on a colony world. What ensures afterwards is a scaling story or survival. I won’t get into detail; I absolutely refuse to get into details. Shedding even a couple do not do the epic space story justice. We can just cut to the combat. It’s an action RPG type of combat system, so you control mainly yourself and tell you squad mates advanced commands, like to use their powers, take cover, or assign which weapon they should use. That last one is pretty important because your squad mate will not do AI weapon switching, no matter what. That’s more a good thing than anything else. The AI is smart enough to handle most combat without you holding their hand, but when you’re surrounded, it helps to have some set combat tasks assigned.
So, will you die during combat? If you’re anything like me, then the answer is, yup. I died at least 20 times throughout the entire game. That’s nothing compared to the amount of deaths I incurred while playing any Halo, but the load times in the game are long enough that an death is quite annoying. But, no battle is impossible with a set number of commands and some proper use of the hiding system. I would actually like to think the combat is something like that of Gears of War, except no reload minigame you have to do and there are 3 as opposed to 2 of you. Also each squadmate has their strengths and weaknesses, thus before going into each battle it’s good to have a proper balance of each characters powers. Here is where the concept falls, though…I admittedly beat most of the game using nothing but combat heavy characters. I even beat the final boss using just brute force as opposed to any real tactics. This is not to say I went through the entire game this way, but something tells me I could have just picked my most combat heavy characters and dropped the hammer on anything I saw. I still had a great time with it though.
After beating the first game, I went to my local GameStop the next day and got Mass Effect 2 (note: I haven’t beaten the game, but have logged in 7 hours) and having played it a bit…I am hooked. It picks up right were the first one leaves off and thrusts you straight into the action. What the first game had was a ton of downtime, but this one is a constant stream of action and story. Where in the first game I still say straight brute force is king, this one makes using your tech and biotic powers an absolute necessity to survive. I will give my full thoughts on it later….