Here we go again. Another year, another top Ten list that I’ve left till tragically late to finish writing. It doesn’t help that so much good stuff ended up coming out so late in the year. But tradition is tradition and here I am, spending the last ten days of the year talking about my ten favourite video games of 2021.
This list is one of my top ten favourite games that come out in in the year 2021. In the past I’ve been a little loose with the rules and kind of slipped DLCs and expansions into the mix. But with the real rise of service games now, I felt like I finally had to break away and create a list of my older favourite games too. Which you can check out by clicking this link here.
Okay, so Number 8. The one cheat of the year:
#8: Mass Effect: Legendary Edition
Played on Xbox One X | Released 14th May | Developed by Bioware
So yeah. Technically, this game already showed up on my Top Ten Old Video Games of 2021 list. But in that instance, I was mostly talking about the versions of Mass Effect 2 and 3 that were bundled into the Legendary Edition of the game.
I always do a bit of cheating when it comes to these top ten lists at the end of the year. But in 2021 I feel like I can say that these entires are relatively shenanigans-free. Relatively…
Because yeah, while I put Mass Effect: Legendary Edition on my Top Ten old games for 2 and 3, I’m putting it here mostly for Mass Effect (1), which is the one game of the three that I feel actually received significant attention from the developers when it came to this remastered release.
Although, you may have noted that this game ranks somewhat lower on this list than it did on my older one. Well, that’s because at the end of the day, the original Mass Effect is still the original Mass Effect, no matter how much of a pretty paint-job you give it. Sure, there are some much needed improvements to gameplay in there too, which is why I feel like number eight on this list is a fair spot for it.
Funnily enough, in my review for Mass Effect 1 as a part of this collection back in June, I mostly spend the entire content of the post talking about how the game wasn’t as great as my rose coloured glasses had always led me to believe it was. How all the heavy lifting and amazing world-building I value so much from the Mass Effect world comes to pouring through Codex entries and not organically in the story itself.
I hardly talked about the improvements to the gunplay, character powers and vehicle sections turn the first Mass Effect from a very clunky game that felt like it needed to be suffered through into a pretty slick RPG action game. Albeit one that still defers to its two sequels in practically every regard.
I still love Mass Effect through, and I am hugely appreciative of Bioware for going back and doing the work they did. Sure, I would have enjoyed a more ground up remaster akin the Final Fantasy VII Remake of last year, but probably not at the expense of whatever Mass Effect game Bioware have got in the works currently.
The Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is a great way to return to what is probably my favourite trilogy of Video games ever. And while I still think the first game is a little bit of a chore compared to the two amazing games that follow it, it’s still super cool to go back to it and experience it all again. But prettier.
And you know it’s still good because the act of writing this post is giving me the itch to go back and start that Insanity, Renegade Fem-Shep play-through that I’ve been wanting to do ever finishing putting over a 100 hours into the the trilogy once already this year.
A Richard Wood Text Adventure 