Opinion on ME1's Mako

[mikev7.0]

I felt the Mako was a very fun vehicle to use. I found the handling to be appropriate for low-gravity environments.

I also feel that the weapon systems were completely adequate.

I mean, you've got a very effective machine gun which is highly accurate, and a hard-hitting cannon.

Also I agree that the Mako made the worlds feel very large. I also feel it gave the player an incredible amount of freedom.

On one other note, I enjoyed being able to use the booster to "pop-shoot" over cover using the cannon. The booster feature permitted me to be extremely effective in a tactical sense.

Finally, by comparison, I thought that the hammerhead is utterly gimmicky, and I dislike it very much. The weapon system is a snoozefest that rarely involves any skill.

This is how I feel too. It just seems to me that by switching to "scanning" they just took a whole part of the game that required learning to use it, and changed it to busy work. That's the thing with ME2 for me, it just feels so much.....lighter? I don't know the exact right word but I do have a good example. Meet Dr. T'Soni the cardboard cutout quest machine. I'm done. So far, I have no plans to buy 3, I really don't feel like it's Bioware realizing a lot of dreams that they have about what games can be (as was the case with Mass Effect) I feel like it's just EA trying to get out a yearly product. No thanks.

 

[DustyDrB]

I have to say...I prefer Mass Effect 2's take on exploration. I know you can really hardly call it that, but it was so tedious and unrewarding in the first game. All the non-story planets were filled with copy and pasted locations and just had an ounce of story to them (that was usually told to you in a dialogue box after you killed everything). And getting there could be a pain in the ass. I used to defend the Mako, but now that I've been much more thorough (I'm pretty sure I did everything you possibly can do on my last playthrough) I've seen how extremely poorly the Mako handles on many planets (there's one in the Geth Incursions side quest, and I think another one in the Major Kyle one too that are filled with steep and unclimbable mountains).

I didn't miss the Mako. Not to mention the missions it led to were often just too vanilla, so the payoff just wasn't there. Mass Effect 2's side missions were just better and more varied. They didn't re-use locations and didn't always boil down to "kill everyone in the base".

 

[Tanfastic]

I liked the Mako but I like the Hammerhead more, I just wish they brought back giant planets but instead of Mako its the Hammerhead (or some new Great White or something.)

 

[Elfgore]

The Mako in Mass Effect 1 for me ruined exploring. It was just a dumb concept. Mass Effect 2 got ride of it. But they added the slightly better, but still bad scanning system.

 

[-Dragmire-]

Something which occurred to me just seconds after my last post.

Is there much of a modding community for Mass Effect? I'm really surprised I've never heard about anybody mocking up a Warthog escape-type level (like the ends of Halo and Halo 3) using the Mako.

Has this been done and I missed it?

I looked for mods as well, it looks like they were locked out though and limited to console commands.

 

[ascorbius]

I liked it. My only problem was the planets were bland. - apart from the story planets that is..
ME2 felt much smaller because there was less in the way of exploration.
I hated the scanning for resources mini-game, that was a replacement for the Mako? Urgh.. I did it anyway to get the good ending.. but if they've put that into ME3 I'll burn the office down.

The whole point with the odd mechanics of the Mako was that it had a Mass Effect core inside of it to lower its mass - hence the easy planetary landings without it piling into the ground making a large crater filled with jam.

I found it easy enough to control if you steered with the camera and made minor adjustments to the steering with the left stick.

There's nothing quite like the feeling of pancaking a creeper under your wheels after you've jumped on it. Ah, the memories

 

[CJ1145]

I didn't start to dislike it until I heard how everyone else hated it. I think a good 90% of the problem is the mob mentality. I think it works just fine, even on the console.

 

[thest3alth]

It was annoying as hell. Not so much the Mako, but the terrain. The slightest bumps made it go flying off course. It was like the Mako was weightless.

 

[Hristo Tzonkov]

Meh. I managed to get it stuck atop a support beam on the Sky Bridge. The thing controls like it has no mass, so I was never real fond of it.

It really has no mass if you read about it in the codex.Or very little.

As for me I found it exceptionally fun.It was a blast driving the mako around shooting at things.It was the repetitiveness of the mako that was boring about it.It had a lot of potential that didn't go anywhere...Also climbing nearly vertical surfaces to get to a precious metal.

 

[Juuel]

I liked the sense of vastness planet exploration bought, but the controls of Mako were just miserable. The thing was constantly just flipping over and a handful of times the big underground worm, whatever it was called, killed me by appearing right beneath me. However, controlling Mako wasn't as painful when you weren't climbing up a huge mountain, and killing Geth with it was alright. I prefer ME2's Hammerhead, but it's a shame that they removed most of the planet exploration with planet scanning and on-foot shooting sessions. However, I hope ME3's resource gathering is closer to ME2 than ME1, because in ME1 you would have to drive a couple of miles to get a chunk of metal that apparently had no proper use.

 

[-Dragmire-]

I have to say...I prefer Mass Effect 2's take on exploration. I know you can really hardly call it that, but it was so tedious and unrewarding in the first game. All the non-story planets were filled with copy and pasted locations and just had an ounce of story to them (that was usually told to you in a dialogue box after you killed everything). And getting there could be a pain in the ass. I used to defend the Mako, but now that I've been much more thorough (I'm pretty sure I did everything you possibly can do on my last playthrough) I've seen how extremely poorly the Mako handles on many planets (there's one in the Geth Incursions side quest, and I think another one in the Major Kyle one too that are filled with steep and unclimbable mountains).

I didn't miss the Mako. Not to mention the missions it led to were often just too vanilla, so the payoff just wasn't there. Mass Effect 2's side missions were just better and more varied. They didn't re-use locations and didn't always boil down to "kill everyone in the base".

I agree that the side missions in ME2 were better in that they were more varied and diverse but I'm having trouble thinking of a side mission where you could move to the next room without killing everything in the current room. I thought "kill everyone in the base" applied to ME2 as well.

 

[Aqua Trenoble]

I thought that the Mako was fucking awesome, easily the best vehicle I've ever controlled. It's bouncy as fuck but in a good way and in a terrain that supports that. The weapons are overpowered but really that's only when you use the cannon strategically as a sniper-gun. It took a while to learn how to control properly but then so does everything else. I can see why people would complain about the vehicle, but in all fairness that's only because they don't know how to use it properly.

Maybe the keyboard makes enough of a difference that I was placed in a completely different situation. I rather doubt it though since joysticks tend to be easier to control than WASD.

... why heal a broken limb when you can just chop it off and be done with it.

Wow, I hope for your sake that you never break anything important... idiot.

 

[Choppaduel]

Fun times bouncing around planets with nice skyboxes. Fun times obliterating little geth with the tank shot.

fuck planet scanning, fuck ME2

 

[Ayoxin]

I found it fun, easily maneuverable but it did tend to bounce too much after a jump off a cliff. The other thing that bugged me was the fact that this thing could almost literally scale a 90% slope albeit at a very slow speed. The physics of the Mako were messed up at best. But at least it worked and it was fun to drive.

 

[maninahat]

Bounding over ridiculous hills and jumps pleasingly reminded me of monster truck madness. I think the problem was less with the Mako and more with the uninspired locals. They were almost featureless, all looked alike, all had little to them save for a space hub and a satellite wreck. If it had some foliage to crush, it might have helped.

 

[mikeli4194]

I actually didn't mind it too much. My biggest disappointment with ME2 (apart from being dumbed down, gameplay-wise) was the lack of the sense of epic scale that the first game gave, a lot in part due to the Mako. The Hammerhead brought back some scale, but it was DLC, and the damn thing was way too weak. Let us drive a fuckin' Great White in the third one, Bioware!

 

[FPSMadPaul]

Well I had difficulty travelling in a straight line on the 360. It seemed to take my commands and blow them way out of proportion. "Oh, a rock, better turn left." *Performs hairpin turn, sails majestically off cliff.* Not to mention the fact that there wasn't really anything fun to drive around in the first place. Oh, and I hated how long it took to repair. And it was surprisignly hard to hit individual enemies. Yeah, just hated it overall.

Couldn't help but laugh at this because I had a similar experience. I couldn't have summed up my feelings much better myself... TERRIBLE!

 

[DustyDrB]

I have to say...I prefer Mass Effect 2's take on exploration. I know you can really hardly call it that, but it was so tedious and unrewarding in the first game. All the non-story planets were filled with copy and pasted locations and just had an ounce of story to them (that was usually told to you in a dialogue box after you killed everything). And getting there could be a pain in the ass. I used to defend the Mako, but now that I've been much more thorough (I'm pretty sure I did everything you possibly can do on my last playthrough) I've seen how extremely poorly the Mako handles on many planets (there's one in the Geth Incursions side quest, and I think another one in the Major Kyle one too that are filled with steep and unclimbable mountains).

I didn't miss the Mako. Not to mention the missions it led to were often just too vanilla, so the payoff just wasn't there. Mass Effect 2's side missions were just better and more varied. They didn't re-use locations and didn't always boil down to "kill everyone in the base".

I agree that the side missions in ME2 were better in that they were more varied and diverse but I'm having trouble thinking of a side mission where you could move to the next room without killing everything in the current room. I thought "kill everyone in the base" applied to ME2 as well.

There was the one in which you release a VI's control of a Cerberus research station. There were no enemies in the station. You could die in a particular hallway from extremely hot fumes that were periodically released. The VI tried to discourage you from "killing it" the whole time.

There was also one (though I wouldn't say this one was handled well. It was kind of Mass Effect 2's attempt at platforming...without a jump button) in which you found a crashed ship and recovered some data from the wreckage.

There were two or three others without any combat. One had you restore a colony's shield to protect it from solar radiation. Another had a Mining Mech that you had to keep finding power cells for (though there may have been a couple of varren there). Then there were a few Hammerhead missions with no combat (and I did actually like the Hammerhead...as long as I wasn't fighting in it).

 

[AwesomeNinjaPowers]

My opinion on the ME1 Mako is that it is a 1000 times better than the planet mining from ME2

 

[Jake0fTrades]

Coming from someone who would rather just scrap vehicle sections altogether, I found the controls of the Mako to be rather manageable, really. What really did it for me was the map layout. Every planet required me to drive this thing up a mountain.