I Heart Story...

But not in the face of bad game play!

Absent from my Wreck Awards for 2007 was a "Game I was most disappointed in" award. I finished Assassin's Creed about three weeks ago and I have started Mass Effect twice since then. What I took away from each game was incredible story mixed with redundant and sometimes unfair game play. Overall Assassin's Creed seems to be the better of the pair, but it felt like I was fighting the developers of both titles to have a fun time.

Mass Effect frustrates me to no end in its game play (gun play and vehicle mechanics), but charms the pants off me in its story and writing. After the brief love affair that I had with KOTOR and the slap in the face that was KOTOR2 I was anticipating a lot form mass effect. The combat seems like it wasn't tested by anyone. For bugs yes, but what about fun? It has a cover system like a lot of games these days, but no Gears style cover button. It is a balancing act with the thumb stick to try and stay on a wall and try to lock on to targets. The enemy AI likes to charge my position all the time and one shot melee attack me or eat enough bullets to make superman hang a poster of them in his room. The frustrations only continue from there and can best be described in the following example.

On the first side mission I took, I was to travel to a planet and investigate a distress signal in a mine. I land on the planet and struggle with the vehicle controls for a few minutes, but finally made my way to the mine. I navigate the empty mine via way points and get to the source of the signal. Oh no its a trap! Some space pirate tricked me a left an armed nuke in the mine. A button press mini game pops up to disarm the nuke and I do. Upon exit of the mine I am at a higher elevation than where I entered. Waiting for me at my vehicle where four of the space pirate's goons (I guess they were confident that I would defuse the bomb). From the high point I am at I can not target them with my pistol. So I try to run down the hill to get in range only to be gunned down before I can even target them, let alone fire on them. They have sniper/assault rifles and I have a pistol.

So load it up again and try something new right? Wrong, the games auto save last ticked when I touched down on the planet, not when I finished the mini game and sat through a load scene to get outside again. So I had retread the same ten minutes of driving, empty cave searching, replay the mini game and pop up high above the same band of goons. This time I saved right away. My AI partners both had sniper rifles/assault rifles so why not them duke it out AI to AI. They both die after exchanging fire for a solid five minutes of me just ducking out of the way. Reload rinse, repeat and I got the same result. So clearly I wouldn't be able to take them head on. So upon the next load I just started running down the mountain in the opposite direction and circled back using my vehicle as cover and eventually got in it.

At this point I could have thrown it in reverse and used the menu system to get back to the ship. There are space pirates on the loose though and they just kicked my ass through four load screens. I have an ultra advanced armored space car with machine guns and missiles, advantage Wreck, end of story, there will be hell to pay! Except my vehicle drives like cream cheese on jello and the pirates small arms cut through its armor like a hot knife through butter. I had to ditch my vehicle behind cover for ten minutes while it self repaired to full. I finally dropped all the pirates and got out to collect one useless weapon and a piece of armor as my reward.

I turned off my 360 and did not load the game up again for three weeks. I started a new character who can use all weapon types and I am trying to start over. Playing through the three hours I had already been through again is painful, but I am willing to give the game a little more time. If my suffering continues though I will most likely sell it and pick up Mario Galaxy with the cash.