Finished Mass Effect

Well, I'm finally done with Mass Effect: finished it yesterday. It took me over 60 hours of gameplay and almost completely absorbed the 9-10 days I spent playing it (yes, that comes out to about 6 hours of gaming a day...), but now I'm done.

Well, sort of...it's probably not possible to completely level-up your character in one playthrough, so like Dead Space, the game allows you to start the whole thing over with you current stats and gear, and of course, this is what I'm doing now that I'm "done" with the game. That said, it appears that the highest level you can reach is level 60 (I'm at 50 now), and I've almost reached the apex of the available equipment I can buy, so once I finish maxing my team out, I'll probably quit and let the game cool off before I give it a go again.

See, Mass Effect, like so many games out there these days, allows you to develop your character as either totally good, totally bad, or some mixture of both. In addition, there are six different character classes you can choose from, so I'm sure sooner or later I'll start a totally new game with all new characteristics (including gender). In fact, for a test run of the character facial modeler, Candace and I tried to make the hero look like her yesterday...not sure how successful this was, but still. In addition to all this, the game also features a downloadable extra mission that I haven't yet played through, so I'll save this for my next game to ensure it stays really interesting. Finally, as if this weren't enough, Mass Effect 2 is probably going to come out by the end of 2009, so I shouldn't have too long to wait before I get totally engrossed in this game world once again...

By the way, this isn't my review of the game: that will be coming as soon as I finish maxing out my character. This does, however, mark the beginning of the end of my obsession with this game, so hopefully I'll be able to start blogging regularly again... =)