Mass Effect

Mass Effect is a very unusual and exciting representative of the RPG genre just because the plot of this game is set not in some fairy land populated with elves and dragons but in the year of 2183. So, it is a piece of science fiction. There is a lot of science fiction in video games in general, but not in RPGs which are mostly about fantasy. We can name only one sci-fi RPG similar to Mass Effect in scope and orientation – Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

The plot of the game is not exactly original, resembling popular sci-fi series such as Star Trek and Babylon 5.

Even though not related to the Star Wars world, the game universe draws upon its features heavily. It has mysterious artifacts of a defunct ancient civilization that enabled the human race to travel in space. It has a “first contact” war. It has special agents of the local counterpart of the Galactic Commonwealth, a race of sentient machines trying to kill all organic life in the galaxy, etc.

The game has a lot of indisputable highs, though. It offers an advanced character generation system that is no worse than that of TES IV: Oblivion in setup flexibility. There is a wide choice of battle classes with an original skill development system. There is no strict line between the good and the bad guys. The in-game characters play their parts well, too. Although intricate, the plot is overall linear, and you can’t join with the main evil-makers in the game. The abundance of locations has somehow affected their quality: the numerous planets are designed in the same way. This may be also due to the fact that Mass Effect has been released on the Xbox 360, besides the PC/Windows platform.

The multiplatform nature of the project affected its visuals, of course. As usual, textures suffered the most. And as is often the case, this was compensated by lots of shader-based special effects. Anyway, the developers achieved impressive results thanks to Unreal Engine 3. This engine is known for its good optimizations for a wide range of configurations, including rather modest ones. Let’s check out if this is true for Mass Effect.