I doubt I’ll be the first to say it, but, what a disappointment. As a fan of the Xbox 360 franchise I was expecting at least a slight tie in with the epic space action/RPG game Mass Effect that came out a while back. However, I was severly dissappointed with what I had after downloading this game. What makes Mass Effect Galaxy such a tragedy is that it did not have to be a bad game. The iPhone is more than capable of hosting a Mass Effect experience that fans would appreciate.Would Mass Effect on iPhone be a huge epic like the Xbox 360 game? No, but it could get a hell of a lot closer to it than this disinterested shooter. This isn’t even a compromise; it’s a cop-out.
The game is a pointless tilt-and-tap shooter where you just clear out room after room of space thugs pretty similar to the arcade game “Smash TV”. You simply tap an enemy to target it and then Jacob does the rest of the work, auto-firing bullets until you either select another enemy or the current target is dead. You access special moves like biotic attacks (temporarily freeze the enemy) or shield removal by touching icons along the side of the screen. The most effective secondary attack is the heavy shell, which acts like a grenade. Each special move has a refill timer, so you cannot simply hammer on the heavy shells. Once you kill every enemy, the exit opens and you move into the next room only to repeat the exact same procedure with the obstacles and walls moved to different locations.
Tilting the phone to guide Jacob is clumsy. Supposedly, you can calibrate the accelerometer by pausing the game so you can play the game at any angle, such as sitting or in bed. This never did quite work right for me, the only time I could get Jacob to move with any degree of precision was when I held the iPhone parallel to the floor and hovered over it. The dialog scenes between combat missions are also slimmed down from the console game. Since the narrative was such an integral part of the Mass Effect console game, it was important for Bioware to include them here. You do not have the branching conversations but you can select responses from multiple options and sort of guide a conversation along. You can immediately challenge a foe and jump into combat, or talk it out a little and get more pieces of the story. How much consequence dialog scenes have is questionable. Your responses do not shape Jacob’s character like they did Shepherd’s in Mass Effect. That’s terribly disappointing since personal evolution is so critical to the Mass Effect experience.
As for graphics, the stylized, comic book-like direction doesn’t bother me at all. The drawings are smart and clean. What is unfortunate, though, is the weak animation. There are little half-assed animations throughout the game where Jacob will stay perfectly still, but his body just moves ahead. No leg movement. No arm movement. It looks weird. Worse, it looks cheap.
Unrelated gameplay mechanics with a popular console game license strapped on top of it do not fool anybody. The simple shooting scenes could have belonged to any game. That the Mass Effect universe is bolted on to them is puzzling and, as mentioned, very disappointing to a real Mass Effect fan like me. The technical issues like slowdown and clumsy controls are just further twists of the knife. Avoid this uninspired, un-fun game.
Sounds like... I really don't care anymore
Oooooh... another room full of bad guys what could await me after I finish up here....?
Oh yeah, thats right. Some more of the exact same thing...
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