Mass Effect

The positives...

This is a really fantastic game, cinematic as hell, in the way it's directed, the voice acting's excellent, and the backing music fits the whole thing wonderfully.

I'm having huge amounts of fun playing through it, and there are lots of ways to play (soldier, psychic, engineer, etc). It can be quite wordy in places, though you can skip most of the dialog if you want to.

The negatives...

The DRM copy protection is completely ridiculous though. You're only allowed to activate the game 3 times per CD Key. After that you'll need to phone EA and request further activations. (Which they may choose to decline)

The game takes up 12GB of disk space. Are EA telling us that we're never going to uninstall this beast? That we're never going to want to reinstall it in future? That we're never going to reinstall windows or move to a different PC? I don't know what logic they're using, but that's rubbish.

There are plenty of pirate versions and… more »

The positives...

This is a really fantastic game, cinematic as hell, in the way it's directed, the voice acting's excellent, and the backing music fits the whole thing wonderfully.

I'm having huge amounts of fun playing through it, and there are lots of ways to play (soldier, psychic, engineer, etc). It can be quite wordy in places, though you can skip most of the dialog if you want to.

The negatives...

The DRM copy protection is completely ridiculous though. You're only allowed to activate the game 3 times per CD Key. After that you'll need to phone EA and request further activations. (Which they may choose to decline)

The game takes up 12GB of disk space. Are EA telling us that we're never going to uninstall this beast? That we're never going to want to reinstall it in future? That we're never going to reinstall windows or move to a different PC? I don't know what logic they're using, but that's rubbish.

There are plenty of pirate versions and cracked files available online, should anyone *want* to pirate this, so does the DRM do anything to combat piracy? Not at all. It's a waste of time and an invasion of privacy.

5 Stars for the game, -2 Stars for the DRM.

If EA patch the game to remove the DRM then I'll delete / amend this review accordingly.

Ive had my hands on this game for about a week now and its one of those games where your either going to love it or REALY hate it.

Roleplay - To start with there are alot of Interactive cut scenes that you get to choose what to say, either to act as the good/bad guy or girl for that matter. From what i have played ALL dialogue is voiced over and has pretty impressive camera angle choices and character animation to go with what ever outcome of your conversation. But all this can be the let down too, there as ALOT of conversation to be had, its not just a shoot'em up for example once you get to choose your next destination, depending on where you head, it might be about collecting information for someone or just running round collecting stuff, and not a single shot will be fired in over an hours worth of play. But if you head to a different destination, your in the middle of a fight as soon as you get there!!

Combat - It is a point and shoot, but you dont always have to… more »

Ive had my hands on this game for about a week now and its one of those games where your either going to love it or REALY hate it.

Roleplay - To start with there are alot of Interactive cut scenes that you get to choose what to say, either to act as the good/bad guy or girl for that matter. From what i have played ALL dialogue is voiced over and has pretty impressive camera angle choices and character animation to go with what ever outcome of your conversation. But all this can be the let down too, there as ALOT of conversation to be had, its not just a shoot'em up for example once you get to choose your next destination, depending on where you head, it might be about collecting information for someone or just running round collecting stuff, and not a single shot will be fired in over an hours worth of play. But if you head to a different destination, your in the middle of a fight as soon as you get there!!

Combat - It is a point and shoot, but you dont always have to have a good aim as shooting is only have of the battle, you will usually have two other memebers with you that you get to choose before heading out and they will usually shoot at whatever you run into. Which leaves you to the cool feature of your and your members abilities, by holding down the space bar, a kind of battle interface appears and freeses the batlle, where you can perform abilities ranging from Shield penatration, starwars type force abilities and movement commands, soon as you leave go of the spacebar the actions are played out, you dont always have do this for your other members as they will perform some of these commands themselves if the situation reveals it self.

Graphics - i first played this game on a 7800GT and could have the settings on High and get an ok but not great FPS leaving the looks of the game pretty much intaced and still looking good. I then bought an 8800GT and was able to run on Ultra-High settings with AA enabled and was greated with high FPS and an amazing look and feel to the game. In saying that though, this game has alot of flaws, im not going to go into them but if you head over the tech forums you will find people having a tonn of problems with runnign this game, i myself found some of these problems but by running the game on vista usign the run as admin feature, the problems went away.

So in total, i personally think this game is amazing, i love the amount of interacting you can do and it just adds to the enjoyment and the feeling of reward when you complete missions as your not just getting a message saying mission Complete, your getting the responce of the NPC and if you hated doing that perticular mission there is always the option to respond in a possitive or negitive way when they thank you.