The Art of Mass Effect: Prima Official Game Guide [Edizione speciale] [Rilegato]

This book was published in 2007 and so I have the chance to read through a few reviews on Amazon before I bought mine. After reading the book, I'm surprised that their reaction were pretty mixed.

There are five chapters in the book. The first two chapters are on the design of characters and creatures in the game. Chapter Three: Transport is on the different vehicle and airship designs. Chapter Four looks at concept art of objects like furniture, equipments and weapons. The last chapter contains matte paintings for the environment.

This book packs a lot of full colour illustrations with a few pencil sketches. All the art shown are very polished, as in they can be shown to any director who would then give the go ahead order. There are short captions on each page.

The very few game screenshots included are used mainly to compared the final rendering with the concept art. For example, there will be 3D model renderings compared to an actual set which is rendered with texture. There are plenty of matte paintings to look through, with several 3D models to go with some.

What's missing are the individual credits for each illustration. So we'll not know who did what. However, there's a list of artists who worked on the project are at the back of the book on a page. They are:

* Derek Watts
* Matthew Rhodes
* Sung Kim
* Adrien Cho
* Fran Gaulin
* Mike Spalding
* Mike Trottier
* Michael Jeffrey
* Sasha Beliaev
* Mike Higgins

This is a nice book for concept designers, sci-fi and game artists.

(More pictures are available on my blog. Just visit my Amazon profile for the link.)

This is a decent art book with a lot of nice work, but I was hoping for more rough concept sketches of characters, weapons, and armor. There's a lot of nice environmental artwork here, though.

If you're an artist, and are interested in getting this to learn more, then this isn't really good for that purpose. It's good for inspiration, but you're not going to learn much about character construction or anything like that.

Great book, especially if you love some of the more digital art style concept works. It would have been nice to see more pencil style sketches, more progress work, but otherwise it delivers exactly what it promises: an excellent visual representation of the process behind developing a game with a full and rich backstory.