Mass Effect: The First Instalment

Mass Effect is one of those franchises that I've always wanted to play through but never gotten around to doing so. When I was a teenager, I completed the first few missions in an attempted "paragon" run, and then got bored and played Halo and Gears of War, which I found far more interesting at the time.

I decided to spent several evenings throughout April 2024 playing through the Legendary Edition on an XBOX Series S, which includes remastered HD graphics and all of the original DLC expansions. Some of you may have also followed the Mastodon thread where I posted my thoughts as I played through the game. Those posts have served to provide me with useful notes for this review, and hopefully this feels like a much more polished write-up!

I should also point out that I did a renegade (or "villainous") play through with a custom character called Ryan Shepard. He was a Vanguard in the first instalment and a Sentinel in the other two. It wasn't a "pure" renegade run because I wanted to explore the romance options in the story as well, but having seen pictures of the party at Anderson's Apartment from other peoples' play throughs, I think it's clear that the only "friends" Ryan Shepard had by the end were members of his crew that had to be there, because everyone else was either dead or hated him, so I think I achieved my objective of making him an utter bastard.

My thinking with that approach was that the renegade options would provide some hilariously dark story options with which I could make comedy hay, and take me off the usual beaten track of "virtuous space Cassandra saves the galaxy and flies around being a space cop." The game certainly delivered on that with some truly nasty and harrowing decisions! I think it's also testament to the writers that there were times that I felt genuinely horrible for making Shepard commit war crimes on imaginary planets or screw NPCs over. Wrex's dying screams of betrayal in Mass Effect 3 will haunt my nightmares for years to come!

Play Through 2: Electric Boogaloo

Visiting the Citadel again felt like slipping on a warm jumper fresh from the airing cupboard on a cold winter's morning. Giving players the highlight of the game right from the start was a brilliant idea from the writers and game developers. There's a huge winding multi-level map to explore that's buzzing with activity and interesting side-quests, the elevator conversations that punctuate them are usually worthwhile, and you learn more about this new fantasy world through dialogue with important characters and their endless patience for Shepard's incessant questions. It's also interesting enough to provide players with an incentive to keep bringing Shepard back here to turn in completed missions, buy better gear, and find more side-missions.

The teenaged version of me only reached the point of rescuing Liara T'Soni, then apparently got distracted before he reached Feros or Noveria. The adult me decided to complete some side-quests to level up and equip my characters before playing the main story missions, and that turned out to be a good choice on Normal difficulty.

The hacking mini-game was, frankly, a bit naff. You just follow a Simon style sequence of button presses, and the level of difficulty is determined by how many of them you have to press. A later mission shakes things up a bit with a Tower of Hanoi puzzle, but that's essentially the only variation. It's an idea on which the developers expanded in later instalments, and I think that was a good choice, because it nudges players not to waste omni-gel by skipping them. Finding myself unable to hack something because I brought the wrong team members, while also knowing that the Simon puzzle that I'm being blocked from doing is super easy, was mildly annoying.

I still go back and forth on whether or not I like the M35 Mako. Driving a remote control car around on a one square kilometre area of an alien planet is quite fun, and the occasional glitching where it became stuck in the terrain was often hilarious. However, it was also very overpowered, and there were many on-planet missions where I could just park the Mako on top of a mountain, pick off all the turrets and grunts with the seemingly limitless range and ammo of its machine gun, and then drive over to the deserted objective entirely unopposed. Even if I decided to drive in and shoot them like the game presumably wanted, the only time the Mako was ever in any real danger was when more than one Geth Collusus disrupted its energy shield at the same time that Geth Rocket Troopers were swarming it.

Thresher Maw traps should also perhaps be called "noob traps", because after my Mako was fucked up a few times from those giant sand worms digging through the ground while their detector tentacles waved in the air, I eventually figured out that the Mako could just withdraw to a safe distance whenever they tried that to make it stop. From that point onwards, defeating them became a very grind-y and boring cycle of driving in, shooting the Thresher Maw in the face until the gun overheats, withdrawing from the area to do omni-gel repairs, and then repeating that over and over again until the creature's ridiculous number of hit points eventually dropped to zero. This meant that whenever I encountered them, I first checked whether they were guarding anything useful, and if they weren't then I just drove away, because there were many more interesting ways of levelling up than putting up with that nonsense.

Regarding the romance mechanics, Ryan Shepard ended up shagging Ashley Williams, the xenophobic lady squad member that he rescued in the first mission and saved again in a later mission, on the night before the squad faced Saren. It felt like the game really wanted Shepard to romance Liara instead and do some cross-species hanky-panky, and in hindsight that probably would have made more sense because she's in all three instalments. But, I was taking a "path less travelled" renegade run, and I was disappointed to learn that there are no gay romance options until Mass Effect 3, so it felt like it was in-character for the nasty git that I was cultivating to have a one-night-stand with a space Republican that's scared of dying and perhaps mistaking gratitude for sexual attraction.

I'm not going to spoil the story missions and side-missions that leads up to the point of no return, but I think the final level on the Citadel when you confront Saren, the main boss, is a big highlight. Running down an elevator shaft and the outside of the space station with magnetised boots makes you feel like Shepard is actually fighting things in space. The mission to stop a rogue AI on the Earth's moon has a similar vibe, but sadly that isn't a great analogue for the real celestial body that we all know.

Trigger Warning: Suicide

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I unwittingly made Ryan Shepard "intimidate" Saren into shooting himself. While that may initially sound like a hilarious mistake, that was a dark turn for the storyline to take, and I audibly gasped when it happened because, unlike the cutscene after the massacre on Feros, this was Shepard deliberately manipulating an emotionally compromised adversary into taking their own life.

I suppose it's my own fault for choosing the red "intimidate" option instead of just sticking to the pre-provided story options, which perhaps would have delivered the verbal sparring and final boss fight with Saren that I was expecting. Instead Saren revealed that he had listened to Shepard's previous "intimidate" arguments on Virmire and started doubting his own mission enough for Sovereign to tighten its grip on him and modify his body with robot parts. Apparently doing more "intimidate" arguments led Saren not to angrily start a boss fight or join forces with Shepard, but instead accept that he was indoctrinated by Sovereign and follow Shepard's flippant suggestion to "do what has to be done" if he "has the guts."

I think AAA game developers have a responsibility to take care when they broach a sensitive topic like suicide, and it probably shouldn't be treated as the solution to a puzzle or a joke, or used for shock value. Mass Effect was originally released in 2007, so it's perhaps a product of its time, and one would hope that video game storytelling has changed since then as awareness of mental health issues has increased.

Back to the Review

My remorse for Saren's death was short-lived though, because the boss fight with his reanimated robot corpse was the most unbalanced and ridiculous one I've played in quite a long time. It's like the game developers laughed into their cans of energy drink and then said, "Nice levels and armour you've got there, Shep. It'd be a shame if Zombie Saren turned into a jumpy boy with a regenerating shield that never goes down, your squad stopped seeking cover whenever Zombie Saren switched to firing rockets at their genitals, and several swarms of Geth bum-rushed you at the same time!" I had played the vast majority of the game on Normal difficulty, but after two hours of failing miserably and cussing at that boss fight, I finally admitted defeat and rolled it down to Casual, and even then it was still a chore to finish.

I was also annoyed when I discovered that Ilos was the "point of no return" that dismissed all the side-missions that I hadn't turned in and scavenger hunts, because I wasn't far off completing them, and the game had given me no indication that it would happen. Also I couldn't restart that mission when I realised that I'd brought the wrong squad members, which meant that I couldn't do any computer hacking and had to drop the difficulty to Casual to get through that as well. I found the map confusing and spent a while just being completely lost until I eventually worked out that Shepard could walk over an obstacle that would normally block him in any other mission. Suffice to say, this was my least favourite of all the missions, and I felt like I was being penalised again for being a noob!

Overall, I enjoyed playing through the first instalment of Mass Effect, but it came across to me as a "one-and-done" experience that you'd only really try again with a self-insert to turn in missing achievements. I tried to replay it as a paragon femme Shep "do-gooder space cop" after this play through, and it felt like a slog to me. I also kept pressing the "X" button during story missions because later instalments had trained me to reload Shepard's weapons, but in the first instalment that instead throws a sticky grenade, and it didn't feel great to waste the one weapon that the first instalment is very stingy about replenishing. This is the weakest instalment in the trilogy, but I think that's to be expected given the technical limitations with which they were working, and the limited feedback they would've had with closed play-testing. Later instalments definitely benefited from broader feedback from an excited fanbase, and the substantial increase in scope that came from a presumably much larger budget.