I’m in a Mass Effect kick the last few days because a good friend of mine finally started up the game recently. We talked back and forth about it a little, so I decided to give it another playthrough. Yep, still an amazing game and it left me hungry for more. But since Mass Effect 2 isn’t out until January 2010 or somewhere around there, I had to get my fix somewhere else. I decided to hop onto the app store on my iPhone and pick up Mass Effect Galaxy.

My brutally honest opinion, in short, is that it is an awful game. Allow me to elaborate, however.

Combat and Gameplay

This is what kills the game. It is most certainly a game but the game part of the game was the weakest part of the product. I don’t have a ton of experience with the iPhone as a gaming device, I’ve only played Mass Effect Galaxy and Peggle on the thing, so the game might be held back entirely because of the limitations of the platform. I don’t really know. But regardless of why it was bad, it was pretty bad.

The game is a top-down shooter, and it uses the iPhone’s accelerometer for movement. Basically,  you tilt the phone in the direction you want your character to go. You target enemies by tapping on them, and you have a set of abilities you tap to make combat go your way. Any time you’re in line of sight of your target, your character automatically sprays bullets. That’s the entirety of the action in the game. There are minions and bosses, but the only way you can tell you’ve hit a boss is because they load the screen up with more enemies which makes the whole thing awfully laggy. The game suggests the thickness of your targeting reticle will tell you how strong an enemy is, but it wasn’t very noticeable. The lag? I noticed that. Not so much the reticle. It’s just an unpleasant experience.

Art and Story

Mass Effect Galaxy is another story that takes place in the Mass Effect universe, naturally. While it doesn’t focus on Shepard, it does have an impact on the Shepard saga because Jacob Taylor and Miranda Lawson, the two main characters of the game, will appear in Mass Effect 2 as squad members. Mass Effect Galaxy serves to give them some backstory, set up what sort of people they are, and what they’ve done. It also tells us more about the batarians, one of Mass Effect‘s alien races that hadn’t appeared in the original game. You meet them in the DLC campaign Bring Down the Sky, but the DLC is such a pain in the ass that you probably haven’t played it.

The story isn’t a huge, sweeping saga like the Shepard story, but not everybody can be Shepard. It’s a smaller (but still important) story around Citadel politics and drama, and a potential terrorist attack. It’s fun, and it immerses you deeper into the universe. I enjoyed that aspect of it. The game could have benefited from more care being put into Taylor’s dialogue options, but the narrative was there and it was a good time. It wasn’t good enough to make me overlook the godawful combat sequences, but it was still good.

The art is very stylized. It’s recognizable as the Mass Effect world, but it’s not chasing after realism. It’s a different medium, so it needed a different approach. I think they pulled it off, I enjoyed it. My only gripe is that the animation is incredibly limited, there’s no fluid animation here. Every scene is just a few frames. Comic book panes, not a cartoon.

BioWare also continued its habit of modeling their characters after real people. In the case of Miranda, her design is based on her own voice actor, Yvonne Strahovski. Note, I say based. They didn’t copy/paste her into the game or anything.

Really, that last detail was largely an excuse to include a picture of Yvonne Strahovski. It’s largely irrelevant.

To Sum Up

The gameplay sucks, the art and story is fun. If you don’t think of it as a game, and instead think of it as an interactive comic book, you’ll have a better time with it. Is it worth the money? Well, that depends. It’s $2.99 on the app store. Would you pay $2.99 for a comic book? If you would, then buy it. If you wouldn’t, don’t. Easy. Personally, I would consistently pay $2.99 for miniature Mass Effect cartoons on a platform like the iPhone. More fluid animation and voice acting, leave out the terrible combat segments. The combat brings down its worth to me. It was tedious and a waste of time. I would seriously consider paying an extra dollar to skip all of the combat segments if the option were available.

My lust for more Mass Effect still isn’t sated, though. I don’t think it will be until I have my hands on Mass Effect 2. January 2010 cannot come fast enough.