So, I got Mass Effect a little while back. I’ve enjoyed Bioware’s RPG’s in the past, the narrative mechanics were really similar in concept to something I’d written up for the Sims back in the day, and it looked to be a game of pretty insane scope and scale in a really deep, novel sci-fi universe.

The story, so far, is interesting. It’s sort of “typical” Bioware fare, but it’s well done, the writing’s good, and the characters are intriguing. The graphics are generally pretty decent, as well. The problem with the game is that EVERYTHING ELSE IS FUCKING TERRIBLE. Seriously.

1. The Camera: The camera is about as blunt and unpolished a camera as I can imagine. when you’re walking up and down stairs, it bounces with every step in a way that’s not too different than say, a guy with an epileptic seizure. When you run, the character’s position on screen and the field of view changes in a really unintuitive way. The camera pops and snaps all over the place. Sucks.
2. The Combat: Part of me wants to just say that everything in it is complete crap and be done with it. But that’s not giving it a fair shake.
1. There’s no introduction to the mechanics. You’re left to decipher the UI on your own, after a single wall of text that tries to explain as much of it as possible.
2. I picked a class that sucks. Because you’re forced to choose your class before you have ANY IDEA how the game plays, I picked a sniper. The problem is that in this game, the sniper class is horrifically broken, as enemies can run substantially faster than you can aim, and they can run AT your faster than you can switch to a close-range weapon.
3. There are a substantial number of one-hit kills. These often occur right at the beginning of combat, where I’ll keel over dead moments after the start of combat. In one case, I died before I could even turn around after the cinematic, because I was oriented the wrong way when it started. Good times.

I’m sorry, that’s just a collection of absolutely brain-dead stupid things, and the end result is a game that I’m finding so incredibly frustrating that I’m not sure I want to keep playing, despite all the good things that other people have said. To change my class to a character that could actually be competent in combat would require me to go throw away five hours of game. Which sucks.

But at the same time, this is SO bad that I really can’t see myself continuing to play. I want to break the disc in two EVERY TIME I’M IN COMBAT. The single main mechanic of the game makes me want to destroy the game.

Augh. It’s horrible. Horrible.