Mass Effect is a tremendous role playing game and a leading contender for being the Game of the Year.
Excellent story supplements an incredibly detailed and well fleshed out galaxy. Thrilling musical score and an astonishing amount of top notch voice acting. Well written dialog and several actual roleplaying decisions to make. Innovative gameplay hints at the future of both the rpg and shooter genres. Beautiful looking main environments. Tons of places to explore. New Game+ option lets you avoid starting completely over and adds replay value. Achievements actually give you stuff for earning them.
The Bad:
Ratio of side/optional quests to main quests a bit too high. Character development of supporting characters not quite as deep as previous Bioware games. Numerous minor technical glitches. Many of the optional worlds look more or less the same. Could use more variance in the side quests.
Mass Effect is one of the best games the rpg genre has seen in years. It is not without its faults, but they are easily overlooked due to what an amazing achievement the game is. It is a game that is greater than the sum of its parts.
You play the role of Commander Shepard, and can be either male or female. The first thing you do is to choose your gender and background, and unlike with most games, these choices will have an actual impact in the game. Certain quests will show up based on your choices of background, and many characters that you meet in the game will reference your choices and adjust how they speak to you accordingly.
Mass Effect takes place in the Milky Way galaxy, where the discovery of remnants of a long extinct race of a super advanced species called the Protheans has allowed humanity to be able to journey beyond our solar system and have meaningful contact with alien races for the first time. Unlike a lot of other games where humanity is always assumed to be the most important race in the galaxy, in this one, we're the relative new folks in town. The entire galaxy has a political system and structure already in place, and mankind is just now making their first impressions upon the other alien races.
You, as Commander Shepard, play the role of the first human Spectre, a special operations unit who have an open mandate to safeguard galactic piece however you see fit. You answer directly and exclusively to the Citadel Council, composed of a single representative of the three most important races in the known galaxy. As the first human to be granted this honor, the eyes of a large portion of the galaxy are upon you. The game revolves around your pursuit of a rogue Turian Spectre named Saren, who is searching for a long lost Prothean relic that could be the key to either saving, or destroying, all life in the galaxy. The story is one of the best in years and unfolds at whatever pace you like since after the first couple of the hours of the game you're free to advance the main storyline as fast or as slow as you like.
The most impressive of Mass Effect's many strengths has to be the thought and imagination put into developing the structure of the galaxy. The amount of detail in everything from the culture and history of each of the many different alien races you encounter, to the various types of technologies is a bit overwhelming at times. While it is sometimes obvious that a number of things were left out of the final cut of the game, what was left in represents a huge amount of things to explore, discover and do.
The way the 360 Achievements are structured will give you added incentive to do that explorting and go that extra mile to look in every nook and cranny in the game. In a innovative approach that is sure to be copied by future games, Mass Effect actually rewards players who unlock achievements by giving you additional in-game bonuses for doing so.
One significant difference between this game and previous Bioware games like Knights of the Old Republic is that the you are allowed less freedom to choose between being good and evil. Instead, a lot of choices revolve around being either lawful or chaotic. This introduces a greater degree of shades of grey area morality into your decision making, because it allows for the possibility that good ends can be achieved by evil means. Instead of being either good or evil, you are either a Paragon or a Renegade, or something in-between. While not all these choices have a significant impact on which of the several different endings you get, at least a couple of choices do have far reaching impact.
Graphically, Mass Effect shines, and in particular around the facial expressions, body language and posture of your interactions with other people. Having realistic looking facial models is not something that has been done very well in many games of the current generation, but Mass Effects are amazing. Minor changes in facial expression show a surprising range of emotions in your interactions with other characters in the game. A good example of this is when you first talk with Ashley Williams on board your ship. If you're nice to her, you can see little hits of a smile on her face, a slight change to how she holds her head up, and how her eyes look. This sort of attention to detail is quite impressive and ensures that the actual role playing conversations in the game are one of the highlights of the overall experience.
To go along with these very lifelike people and aliens, Mass Effect presents some extremely impressive cities, but at a cost. While the main locations that you visit as part of the central storyline of the game are very well designed and visually splendid looking, the game suffers from a number of minor, but aggravating, technical issues that mar the immersion factor to some degree. Texture popping (when some textures load a couple of seconds after you come into an area instead of right away) is frequent and can be a little silly looking. It can be jarring when a tree's shadow suddenly appears out of nowhere when it wasn't there before. This is both humorous and an unfortunate reminder that you're playing a video game and aren't really Commander Shepard.
Load times happen a bit haphazardly and sometimes seemingly at random, and can be pretty lengthy. Sometimes these are disguised as elevator rides or something similar, but often they occur right in the middle of nowhere as you are walking from one side of an area to another. The game also suffers from some inconsistent frame rates. It isn't bad enough that it will get you killed during intense firefights, but it sure is annoying.
These things are easy to overlook though because of the sheer number of things the game does well.
The musical score of the game is spot on. It reflects the mood of whatever you are currently doing perfectly. When the game is being dramatic, the music rises to match. When nothing too terribly important is going on, the music is unobtrusive and ambient. Perhaps best of all, the music and the voices are well balanced. The music never gets so loud that it drowns out the voice acting in the game. That's good, because the voice acting with superb across the board. Not a single line sounds badly delivered. Given the sheer amount of spoken dialog, that may well be the greatest accomplishment of the entire game.
Since the game does have so much spoken dialog, it is a bit odd that more of it isn't done by your party members. Unless you're on your ship visiting them, they don't talk a lot. One of the things that has long characterized Bioware games it the interactions between the characters themselves. In some of the official trailers posted on the game prior to release, it shows the supporting characters talking to each other and arguing. It is therefore disappointing that they don't do so very often in the game. With the exception of a couple of places here and there, they seldom talk with each other, or comment on your actions for that matter. This is unfortunate because it does detract from them seeming to be real people.
Fortunately, the gameplay more than makes up for this. Unlike in previous Bioware games where you don't really do much during combat, Mass Effect combat handles sort of like a shooter/rpg hybrid, taking some of the best elements of both. While you are actively controlling how successful your character is in combat rather than the result being determined by invisible dice rolls behind he scenes, it is far too tactical for the combat to be purely that of a shooter. Proper use of rpg style abilities and tactics is key to doing well in the combats of the game. Another rpg element is that how good you are with various weapons depends on what class you selected at the beginning of the game and how many points you've invested in which skill. Sure, you can try wielding an assault rifle, but if you aren't the right class of character and if you haven't invested the proper amount of points into using it then you won't do very well with that weapon.
Overall, despite some technical shortcomings and obvious signs that some of the things that were originally intended to be in the game ended up being left out, Mass Effect is a game that draws you in and leaves you feeling satisfied at the end. It is the best rpg of the current generation to date, a solid contender for Game of the Year, and should be a must buy for any fan of the genre who owns a 360.