As you might know, I work away from home mid- week in an area where, whilst lovely and picturesque, has pretty much bugger all to do of an evening and what this means is that I get through a lot of DVD box sets and video games. Last weekend, I swapped out my PS3 for my XBOX360 (I have very little space so I take one system at a time) and started something I’ve been threatening to do for a while. I started re-playing the Mass Effect Trilogy.

Mass Effect was actually one of the very first games I picked up for the 360 and to this day remains one of the finest RPG’s I’ve ever played. However and this might seems strange given that statement, I’ve only ever played it once and never with the Downloadable content. By way of a weak excuse, I downloaded everything ages ago and genuinely meant to start my re-play but new games and movies and comics and girlfriends (now a fiancee) and stuff just sort of kept getting in the way and I just never got around to doing it.

A week ago I finished GTA5 and thought to myself, now is the time! This was an excellent decision. The actual gameplay itself isn’t anything particularly novel or unique in terms of RPGs. You have a fairly standard choice of characters: combat, engineer or biotic (magic) or hybrids thereof but the game’s narrative is utterly outstanding.

Like many RPGs the game often presents you with moral challenges and branching events dependent on how you choose to act or respond in certain events. In many games such decisions are quite morally polarised and present situations such as:

a. buy a candy bar from a sick orphan to save a puppy or-
b. drop kick the orphan and eat the puppy

With Mass Effect however the choices are more subtle and often the lines between right and wrong are subtle and indistinct. Sometimes there just isn’t an ideal solution. To give you an example from this week’s gameplay:

Terrorists were using rockets placed by a science station on a huge asteroid to guide it towards an idyllic human colony which, were it to impact, would trigger an extinction level event killing millions. Having fought a number of mercenaries, deactivated the rockets and found the terrorist leader he presents you with a choice. He rigged explosives to the survivors of the science facility so you can either:

a. try to stop him from escaping which means that he will trigger the bombs and murder the scientists or;
b. let him escape and try to defuse the bombs thus running the risk that he’ll strike again somewhere else.

Its a painful decision and one of many such decisions the game confronts you with. Another interesting technique is that taking aggressive action in combat or conversation.

Another unique point of the series is that the events across each volume in the series actually matter. The world in Mass Effect 2 changes dependent on your choices in Mass Effect using your game save to map the data. As far as I know thats never been done before or since. Certainly not at the same scale. The final volume did attract some criticism and divided opinions because despite the branching paths to get there, the ending was pretty much pre- determined. No matter what you did up until that point the final choice you were offered was always the same several options. Personally I took an ‘Its about the journey, not the destination’ view on it and wasn’t too bothered but people were pissed off enough that Bioware put out a patch that slightly revised the ending. I haven’t got there yet but I’m curious to see what they changed.

The game has a massive cult following on and off the web and spawned a number of comics. I haven’t actually read them but I’ve been told recently that there are a very nice accompaniment to the games and I’ve spotted a very nice collected library edition of the comics that has made it onto the shopping list.

I’ll leave you with this fan made song about the series protagonist, Commander Shepherd by miracleofsound

Let us know what your thoughts are on the series! And remember: #‎fightlikeakrogan‬