[–]vivere_aut_mori 3 points 6 minutes ago
Got to play the trial for a few hours, because the reviews made me curious as to just how bad it could be.
I'll be blunt: I don't like it. I don't like it at all. Mass Effect was like a mid-level of braininess sci-fi series that you got to actually shape yourself. It was full of the usual sci-fi cliches (the alien women just mysteriously happen to be bipedal humanoids with voluptuous bosoms, wide hips, and plump glutes), but at the same time, it broke just about every trend in gaming at the time. It gave you options. Sometimes, you just couldn't win. It had weight to it in a way that almost no other game had before -- or since.
ME:A feels like the bad guy in the first Men in Black movie. You know, the cockroach thing that eats the dude and stuffs himself in the skin, hobbling around and doing a shitty job at impersonating a human? That's what this feels like. There is none of the weight behind this game that there was in the original Mass Effect. I didn't have the same sense of discovery, of nagging curiosity at just why all these ancient civilizations crumbled, at what it would be like to actually meet aliens and be a part of this society where you're the bottom man on the totem pole. I didn't find novel game concepts.
I found myself bored.
It's "inquisition and far cry had a baby, who then had a baby with just cause, who then had an incestuous child with mass effect 3's half-brother." It just feels...hollow. Fetch quest after fetch quest, eye-rollingly simple, tired, and sophomoric dialogue that holds your hand like you're 5 and incapable of understanding context whatsoever, and yes, the animation. Sorry, but Mass Effect 1 had animation that made those characters feel real. In hindsight, it doesn't hold up, but at the time? At the time, ME1 had some of the best damn graphics we had seen. It's what helped you think of those batches of polygons and lines of 1s and 0s as people that you cared about. As much as I despise the modern gaming industry's love affair with graphics, animation is always important. I don't care if the world is not photo-realistic. I just want the people to resemble human beings. I also want the script to resemble human interaction, and it just doesn't. Not at all.
The combat is good, I guess, but if I want run-n-gun acrobatics, I'd go play Titanfall or CoD. The enemies are too bulletspongey, the many of the powers feel way too similar, and the enemies feel so cliche. I felt like I was playing Star Trek: Into Darkness instead of Mass Effect.
My take is the same as it was this morning when reviews broke: wait until it goes on sale in 4-6 months. It needs serious patching anyways to fix the braindead AI and, hopefully, fix some of the facial animation. The voice acting, though, is set in stone. That's where it really falls through. You can almost hear the sound producer say "cut" in between the lines of dialogue. It's sanitary, devoid of that conversational tone you felt when hearing Joker and Garrus trade jokes, or the two engineers talking shop down in the engine bay. You can hear the individual lines, and it's...it's bad. Skyrim mods like Helgen Reborn and Falskaar have better (or equivalent) voice acting, and that's done by total amateurs who recorded in their basements. This is a bargain-bin game for people who found the mass effect series to get worse as it went on due to the loss of RPG elements and the hyper-focus on "action elements." It's a cookie-cutter open world game that is 10 miles wide, but an inch deep, and it really bums me out.
I was hoping that all the anti-hype was clickbait.
It wasn't.
Sounds about right
