Mass Defect: Why Mass Effect Falls Short

Mercury News has published a new article that points out many of the flaws in Mass Effect’s gameplay that your standard “game critic” will have never mentioned.

While the KOTOR game play was more primitive and graphically average, the goal with Mass Effect was far more ambitious. The team tried to create realistic human and alien faces, animated by crisp dialogue. It also tried to create more interesting first-person shooter style combat and to wrap all of this inside a riveting story set in an original sci-fi universe. You can equip your soldiers with all sorts of weapon types. The storyline is truly something that I can see lasting over several games.

But here’s where it breaks down. The tactical play is horrendous. That wasn’t so evident on the early Eden Prime level, but once you’re off in the missions to other planets, it becomes overwhelmingly bad. You feel like you’re fighting with extremely incapable soldiers.

You never run out of ammo. But you’re always shooting these solid mass bullets at the enemy. Every guns sounds and fires and behaves the same, whether it’s a shotgun or an assault rifle. Stupid. Then, when you’re shooting at a target, an orange box appears as the one and only place on that target where you can actually hit them with a mass bullet. That’s not even close to realistic, and counts as stupid No. 2. Then you can’t even tell if you’ve hit your target because your target just keeps coming at you or does not even flinch upon impact, whether their shields are up or down. That’s stupid no. 3. You get a red bar that shows exactly how many times you have to shoot the enemy in order to take them down, no matter whether you’re getting in the equivalent of head shots or toe shots. The grenades are equally stupid. They fly in straight lines like hockey pucks on ice until they hit something. That something will often keep running right at you and then blow you up.

Personally, I have more issues with ME’s gameplay than even this guy did. You’ll be reading about those in our upcoming GotY awards, though :).