By far the best game I have played in my recent history.
The game play is fantastic. I love the on feet battles; including the way you can use all yours skills. Again giving you a pretty good explanation for the skills and how they work, which although they could be impossible to perform in real live, they manage to give you a nice explanation for the phenomenon. You can hide behind objects the same way you do in Gears of War. The only think I'm not very impressed is that all the weapons of the same kind (sniper, shotgun, pistol, assault rifle) have the same shape and only their colors change, plus they don't look very futuristic. You can manage to improve the skills of your team so your abilities supplement each other. In my case I have a genius in decryption and electronics to open vessels, lockers and stuff like that, and I'm a vanguard myself, the third character is change usually depending in what enemy I expect to find. For example if I expect the geths I bring with me an engineer or soldier, if I'm fighting organic life forms I prefer to bring an biotic or the soldier.
I still don't understand all the fuss about the Mako. I realize that the game is not all about driving a car, but rather that the car is a way of transport. In addition, I feel that they did a pretty good job with the Mako and it accomplish its purpose.
The plot is excellent. At this point of the review I feel that I'm repeating all the other reviews but the truth is that the game is this amazing. In my opinion the plot is amazing. It really makes you read everything and participate in the conversation.
Side quests are interesting and not too hard to finish. Different from other RPG games where you need to go there find a stick, then go to that other very far place and find a ball, then go to an even farther town to find two guys and then give the stick and the ball to them so they can play baseball, but before that you need to find an ancient manuscript in and old forgotten ruin 7 miles deep so the can read it and learn the game. The side quests are nice and simple involving a lot of talking sometimes and you can survey and learn about planets while you do them.
In conclusion, this game is very fun, and is going to give you a lot of hours of entertaining game play.