Game: Mass Effect GalaxyPlatform: Apple mobile OSX (iPhone, iPod touch)
Publisher: EA/Bioware

Building upon the framework that Bioware had built up for the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic games on the original XBox, Mass Effect has been my favorite game for the current generation of consoles.  I will admit I am not a hard-core gamer, if only because I have never had the time to invest countless hours of my life into fighting my way through a very hard game.  Truthfully when I do get time to get in front of my XBox 360 I end up playing FIFA since it's a game that I can pick up and play and then not touch for weeks and not feel lost when I return.  Mass Effect had the right balance of a story that kept me interested, and game play that was neither too easy nor too hard so that I ended up stuck at a point and gave up.




Plus it just felt so much like a classic science fiction film, and when at the end it looks like my Commander Shepherd had died I actually got a little teared up.  Eventually she, mine was a no nonsense survivor with just enough compassion to win over allies and talk her way out of fights, survived and I had only the promise of more adventures to keep my going.

When I heard that a Mass Effect was going to released for the iPhone I was both excited and apprehensive.  How would they handle the fact that everyone's Commander Shepherd was going to be different, and if my experience is any indication that people have a strong attachment to their character by the end of the XBox 360 game?  How vital to the world would the story be for those people who missed this chapter and picked up Mass Effect 2?  How could the visual elements of a 360 game be translated to an iPhone's screen?

The answer is that Mass Effect Galaxy is a different game than the original, and apart from the setting and branching dialogue there is little connection to the previous game, which is not a bad thing.  Instead of Commander Shepherd you take the role of Jacob Taylor a former human soldier who after leaving the military took a nice relaxing space cruise but rather than enjoying the 24 hours buffet ended up having to save the ship from alien terrorists.  Eventually he is back working for the military, teamed with a mysterious female spy who for reasons mandated by the genre is both beautiful and prone to displaying a little bit of chaste cleavage.  

Visually the cut scenes and the branching dialogue scenes are great.  Wisely avoiding the look of the original game, the iPhone version is a sort of cartoon / comicish take on the original world.  Everything in these scenes are clear and crisp and visually compelling.




The story itself is great, and the fact that it is going to link into the next full release Mass Effect on the 360 is a bonus for any fans who want more of that universe.  The branching dialogue is a nice touch of the system that's been in place since the first Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic game, and gives the player a way of feeling like they're building the character's personality.  Where the game sadly falls down is in the game play, and a bug that essentially threatens to completely break the experience.

The game play is a top down shooter, with controls based on the iPhone/iPod touch's accelerometer.  You character is constantly shooting and you tilt the phone to move him into position to shoot the enemies and dodge their fire.  Apart from my general dislike of games based on the accelerometer in the first place, there's just not much game play.  Titling the iPhone feels like you're trying to lead a ball into a hole, as opposed to controlling a finely tuned space soldier blasting away at aliens.  There does not seem to be much in the way of strategy involved, and in general the options apart from shooting that are offered so powerful that there's little challenge.

Oh, except when the bug kicks in.  

Perhaps this is avoided with the faster load times on the iPhone 3GS, I'm not sure, and in other early previews this has not been mentioned so this could just be unique to my combination of iPhone 3G and the game.  What happens is that each level load takes quite awhile, which is annoying but I can live with load times I've played Grand Theft Auto.  However the load times can be so long that the game will in fact start playing while it's still loading, and while the spiraling loading graphic rotates in the foreground you watch as the bad guys start blasting your character in the background.  If you're lucky you will start the level behind cover, if not by the time the loading is finished and control is returned to you, you might find yourself either dead or so near death that your time is better spent working on writing your Last Will and Testament. 

The only thing that keeps this from being a game breaking bug is that after you die you can restart the level, and since the level is already loaded the problem does not repeat.  So on some levels you simply have to die so that you can actually have a fair chance at completing it.  

The nice thing with iPhone software however is that it can be updated easily, and hopefully a new revision will solve this issue if it's occurring for people other than myself.

All in all Mass Effect Galaxies is a flawed game that probably will appeal strongest to fans of the franchise.  The low price of iPhone software might make this a good game to check out for fans of the genre as well, but apart from the strong graphical style and branching dialogue, there's not much to distinguish it from other games in the iTunes store.

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