That Mass Effect Shooter... (Patreon)

…on Mobile.

Mass Effect Infiltrator (a very annoying name for search engines giving you Infiltrator CLASS gameplay instead) was made by the same team who made the beloved Dead Space Mobile, and like Dead Space Mobile, people have gone through the effort of remastering its APK, despite or encouraged, by the games not being available for purchase anymore, thanks to EA's usual disinterest in preserving their own games.

I spent hours and hours and hours trying to get both of these games to work with a gamepad or mouse and keyboard via an Emulator, but so far, no dice. I had to swallow my pride and use its native touch controls, and I ended up gathering more footage than expected, not from the novelty of the platform experience, but the universe experience.

I've always wanted there to be more spin-offs in general for franchises. I think it's quite silly that the most Halo's done with its universe beyond Super Soldier FPS games, are a couple Super Solider Top Down shooters and two RTSs.

Same thing with Mass Effect.

So it's strange to see Mass Effect Infiltrator, as it's a glimpse into how the Mass Effect Universe could be used beyond RPGs.

You're a roided up solider here yes, but… you're not leading a squad, commanding a ship, or directing an organization. You're just a dude. In this universe, it's rather refreshing.

What's even more so are upgrade trees and even abilities that aren't the usual Mass Effect structure. Instead of leveling up, you get credits earned through completing fights with the most points, earned through a combination of health retained, time taken, and amount of style. It encourages you to chain together kills rather than putting enemies down one by one, and to vary up your abilities and weapons, the more of both you do, the faster you can upgrade your character and expand your arsenal.

It feels in-keeping with what we'd expect from Mass Effect while doing something different.

However… I can't help but be rather frustrated while playing this game, because of its limitations.

We're talking about a Mobile Game from a small development team in Austrailia during a time when the iPod Touch still existed. It goes without saying that the levels copy/paste their environments, music's reused entirely from previous games, and voice acting's hilariously bad at times.

And what's frustrating is that I can't help but envision a $15-20 3-4 hour Indie FPS with this exact same framework made in Unreal, where you'd have a better chance of selling the sequences this game is trying to sell.

There's a moment where one of the characters you know is revealed to be slowly tortured to death by Cerberus, sending your character into a furious rampage. It'd be a scene that's equal parts harrowing and horrific… if the main character didn't sound like a Serious Sam audition, or if the lighting communicated the tone, or if the music playing wasn't the same as when you exonerate Tali from the Admiralty Board.

I just want somebody to get the chance of realizing something more than another Mass Effect RPG with an identical framework to a game that was already identical to a Star Wars RPG released in the same year as Call of Duty 1.