Mass Effect

In the world of Mass Effect, humans are not the most powerful race. In fact, they are looked upon as pessimists and creatures with high ambitions who are unable to deliver what they promise. In order to establish a valid trust among all the other races in the universe, a lone fighter, Commander Shepard, must now prove his worth to everyone. Mass Effect is a complex story that gets unravelled with every decision you make within the game. Destroy or build. You make the decision, every time.

The game is targeted towards hard-core as well as casual gamers. The action role-playing game has plenty of new features, setting it apart from the usual video game crowd. The game DVD is available for the PC version and carries a Mature rating from ESRB.

Synopsis and Features

In the galactic council, Spectres are one of the most respectable races in the universe. But among one of them has ulterior motives. The Spectre’s actions have let an unsuspecting galaxy become victim to one of the vicious races in the universe – The robotic Geth. Tracing his whereabouts, Commander Shepard must now embark on a quest to discover the real intentions of the Spectre and put an end to all the mayhem caused. Can you help Commander Shepard succeed in his mission?

Originally developed by BioWare and published by Electronic Arts, Mass Effect is an intricately weaved story that has political and military undertones to it. The minimum hardware required to play the game smoothly on your computer are Windows XP, 2.4 GHz Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon equivalent processor, 12 GB of hard disk space, 1 GB of RAM and a NVidia GeForce 6800GT or ATI Radeon 1300XT series graphics card.

The single-player campaign in the game will take you across different planets as you try to find the rogue Spectre. You can begin the game by choosing a class. These are 6 classes at your disposal and the character that you choose can be a male or a female. Each of these classes will have various strengths such as combat, tech, and biotics. As you move forward in the game, you will be awarded points on 2 levels. These are Paragon: for the good things that you do within the game and Renegade: for the bad things that you achieve.

The dialogue system in the game is very important as all your major decisions depend on it. Many situations are so intense that you have to choose carefully to not ruin a person’s life. The circumstances can be anything from consoling victims, exploiting corporations to even where your friends can turn into enemies.

Apart from the main quest, you can also jump into exciting side missions where you get to defeat aliens called thresher maws. These are giant body creatures which burst from the ground and spit poison at you and immediately go back again to resurrect someplace else. These battles are exciting as you can track them by using a vehicle called Mako: an automobile equipped with a gun turret.

The game allows the use of certain special abilities that give you different powers to suppress your enemy. Special powers like singularity can be used to push enemies into the air and then kill them easily. You can upgrade almost anything from your armor to your weapon in this game.

The game promises immense replay value as you can start a new class and build an entire new character to start a new game. In Mass Effect even if the objectives remain same, the gameplay will seem fresh as you get to make your own destiny. Choices you make reflect on the game’s story, leading you to a happy or a disastrous ending.

Online features

The DLCs for the game include Bring Down The Sky and Pinnacle Station. These add extra races of aliens and missions to the game, adding extra hours of gameplay. You can earn points and unlock additional achievements too. The updates, demos and DLCs for the game can be downloaded directly from the company’s website.