Entertain Me With Mass Effect

When I first got Mass Effect for the Xbox 360, I wasn’t impressed at all with it.

The story was good. It was fun to pick certain responses to conversations and questions like you were playing an interactive Choose Your Own Adventure book from back in the 1980s. But I felt from the start that the game suffered from difficulty in aiming and shooting your weapons, various graphical glitches and some issues I had with the controller.

Then when I got 10 hours or so into the game, I fell in love with it and started talking to my friends about how it should take home the Game of the Year honors versus such critically lauded successes as BioShock and Halo 3. The story was still great, the weapons started to get better – almost too good as you didn’t even have to aim any longer – and I had forgotten about the graphical glitches. I felt like my decisions made a difference in how the story played out.

I finished the game this weekend and in the end, I felt less than excited about it. The game took 20 hours to complete, which is about double a normal game, but still wasn’t up to snuff with the length of other roleplaying games like Oblivion and Blue Dragon.

Over the course of the last few weeks I have been switching back and forth between playing Mass Effect and Blue Dragon. I’ll be back soon with a full review of Blue Dragon, but I can tell you now, I have enjoyed playing Blue Dragon more than I have enjoyed playing Mass Effect.

Mass Effect was a great game – don’t get me wrong – but I just felt completely unfulfilled at the end of the game. That shouldn’t happen with a Game of the Year. …Back in a few with a Blue Dragon review and at the end of the month with my Game of the Year blog.