Playful – Mass Effect: Ascension (Drew Karpyshyn)

Mass Effect at the end of the last decade it became a real phenomenon and one of the examples of the growing influence and significance of this type of media industry as video games. Of course, there have been games before that went beyond their essence and gave rise to a whole range of by-products and creations of the media sphere. However, I can’t remember a single game before that was promoted so persistently through other forms of art.

After finishing the first game in the series, I found myself in an ambivalent state. On the one hand, the plot of the game, its world and characters attracted my curiosity to further discover the games of the series. However, the gameplay itself tired me a little. As a result, I decided to do something that didn’t require tens of hours of time and didn’t contain boring gameplay. So I returned to the book series again from the main screenwriter of the game itself.

As I already wrote, the entire franchise https://eurogoldgamecasino.co.uk/games/ started with the book Mass Effect, and it was not surprising that it was continued with the book, soon after the game was released. The novel itself, on the one hand, is a spiritual sequel, an offshoot of the first game, because the events described in it take place a couple of months after the ending of the first game. In addition, the book continues the first novel, returning to the old characters and continuing to follow their lives.

The main plot revolves around Cerberus group, with which we had to get acquainted very closely in the game, and the Cerberians were second in their harmful importunity only to the main opponents of the entire game – the geth. Cerberus, which eventually turned out to be a secret organization of earthly imperialists, created all the wild things in the game not just for fun or for the sake of profit, but with the goal of exalting humanity and putting people at the head of the galaxy. Good goals – but outside of state institutions and restraining systems you can quickly slide into a terrorist organization. And one of the Cerberus experiments turns out to be the introduction into the Alliance program for the training of human biotics. And, as usual, these secret plans do not lead to anything good.

If you look at it with a more sober look, the novel is quite weak. More precisely, he is strong in those places and characters that you wouldn’t expect, but manages to fail in the most seemingly banal and simple things. For example, criminal Omega asteroid world turns out to be a wildly clichéd place that does not have any atmosphere or features that are needed when it comes to an image that has already been hackneyed hundreds of times. On the other hand, it is worth being on Nomadic fleet quarians living under “war communism”, how the narrative blooms with colors, interesting details and the reader himself is ultimately imbued with both the fleet itself and the quarian culture.

Or take the characters, the main positive characters are absolutely nothing, so much so that the heroine Cali Sanders in the end she looks like some kind of fool, fooled every time. Even each of the secondary quarian characters or the autistic girl as characters evoke more interest and empathy. But the author did a really good job with the image of the Cerberus agent who handed over his adopted daughter to that same Alliance program: he is literally torn apart because of a sense of duty, love for his daughter, he is a rather pathetic and degraded type, addicted to drugs from all his worries. But it is precisely because of his imperfections that it is interesting to follow and empathize with him. Perhaps if the entire book had been built on his character, from his perspective and with his thoughts, it would have been much stronger.

However, we have what we have. In the end, the novel is written in a fairly lively and fascinating language, and for all its disadvantages you can find the same number of advantages. And certainly this book is suitable for all lovers "Mass Effect" as a plug between the first and second games in the series. For the rest, it’s better to pass by, because as an ordinary combat fantasy, the book is rather weak and is definitely inferior to the first novel in the series.