A good start for a new IP, but it's too clunky in places to be a truly great game.
On booting up the game you're invited to create your own character (although you can't change the name. He or she will always be called Commander Shepard). The options for changing facial appearance seem in-depth at first, but it's very hard to gain any noticable change from the default appearance. Even if you choose a female face they still end up looking rather grizzled! The more important choice here involves choosing your character class which will influence the skills available to you as you level up during the campaign. The classes range from the usual RPG soldier and engineer types, along with some more interesting biotic characters with powers like telekinesis.
Once you're into the game itself, the visuals make great first impressions. The sense of scale in early areas like The Citadel is suitably daunting for a space epic and the character models have a mind-boggling level of detail, especially some of the more complex alien races like The Krogan. Quickly though the game begins to show some of the familiar Unreal Engine visual glitches. The first of these is severe texture-popping, meaning that the textures for character and object models often fail to load as quickly as the geometry. The result of which is a few seconds of looking at grey mess when new areas load. The other visual problem is the framerate slowdown which occurs in busy areas and in combat. It's not as annoying as the texture-popping but it's a niggling issue in too many next-gen titles that could easily be sorted out by extending the development cycle.
The combat itself plays very similarly to Gears of War, though the cover system isn't as well applied. The gunplay is reasonably well done, but as with most action RPGs it obviously hasn't been a top priority in development. The combat is much more interesting when you begin to experiment with the biotic powers. This can create some spectacular action, but unfortunately, in order to activate these techniques you have to pause the action to bring up a menu and select the power you wish to use. Dipping in and out of gameplay like this spoils the immersion of the player with the game. In combat you also have some basic squad commands such as "attack my target" and "take cover." Sometimes these work brilliantly, but the AI often gets confused and tends to run around in circles, making them perfect cannon fodder for enemies.
Far more interesting than any of this are the conversations you can have with other characters. When talking to other characters you can choose how to respond to what they say from 3 different options. One is a neutral response, one is negative and one is positive. Initially this seems like a fantastic idea trying to work out what is best to say to different people to gain the desired result. However, on the list of possible responses the "good" one is always at the top of the list, the "bad" one at the bottom and the neutral one in-between. As a result, you barely have to think about what you say which, like the stop-start nature of the combat, spoils the sense of immersion in the game.
Even for all of Mass Effect's problems though you'll find yourself compelled to continue playing because of the utterly engrossing story. Sure, there are elements obviously borrowed from both Star Wars and Star Trek but the overall story-arc is one of gaming's much better tales. There's also a whole wealth of side-missions and uncharted worlds to explore so you can really immerse yourself in the Mass Effect universe if you so wish.
As a gameplay experience Mass Effect is undeniably flawed, but the story and sense of adventure will surely keep even the most sceptical player hooked right through to the conclusion.