Mass Effect takes the next step of RPG storytelling to a whole new, and incredibly innovative, level.
STORY LINE:
In the end this is what Mass Effect's focus is and what will hook you and keep you playing it through over and over and over. For those of you who have play other Bioware RPGs such as "Jade Empire" and the famous "Star Wars: Knights of the old Republic" series, you already probably have an inkling as to the kind of experience I'm referring to. For those of you who haven't played those games, I'll try my best to explain it. As with previous installments of Bioware games, the style of game play and how you experience the story is almost completely dependent on you, the player. You see most other videogame RPGs simply run you through a set story with some ability to mold your character's fighting style. What Bioware does to change that trend is to almost flip it completely around. During the course of the game you will find yourself thinking deeply on what to do next, because everything you do will mold the story and your character's personality, rather than just your standard combat stats. Each time you play can be a completely different experience depending on what you feel like responding to. It's a formula Bioware has been successfully experimenting for years and they've definitely taken it up a notch in Mass Effect.
You start the story as a character you can craft. Everything from gender and facial features and job specialization is there, but a new feature I've never really seen explored before was the fact that you could hack out a basic past from two seemingly simple choices with three possible responses each: Pick out a basic childhood origin and military "claim to fame". These choices at first seem like trivial nonsense, but in Mass Effect they actually affect how NPCs respond to you and can even affect some of the game's hidden side missions. After you make your character the game take place with you as an Alliance military soldier who happen to be getting ready for some sort of secretive mission. From here you can walk around and chat with NPC to get a feel for is lengthy in depth back-story. Eventually you superior will have briefing on your current mission, to pick up an ancient alien beacon for study. It turns out that the mission is a little more than what you where ready for, however, when you discover that the dig site was brutally attacked by Geth, a race a synthetic beings that no one had heard from in many years. To top it all of a mysterious agent called Saren seems to allied himself with them for an unknown purpose. Soon after you survive this mission the true hunt begins when you are assigned to investigate the disturbing implications behind the attack.
I could go into more detail, but I won't simply because it might spoil the experience and the fact that because the story will always very and tweak itself depending on how you proceed after your hit the ground running to the story's intro. It's not too much to go on if you have played, I know, but like I said before navigating clueless through the story on you own is more than half the fun in this case.
GAMEPLAY:
This type of game play was a new unique mix that I've never seen in an RPG before...in that it's like a shooter...but not. You select your weapons and armor, customize them and then proceed to run around shooting as if your where play a standard 3rd person shooter much like "Gears of War" except in this game, you can use powers and moves you can acquired through a skill point system much like any other RPG. It's an admittedly odd mix that takes a bit getting used to but after that first couple of missions and things get a bit more challenging you can have a blast with it.
The only thing that ever really frustrate me, however was when you got to drive around in the tank like land rover that you use to get round the landscapes of the various. It could have been more fun if the mechanic were hammered out a little more before the game's release, but with the game the way it is using the land rover will probably the most annoying thing you'll find in the game as it's slow, bounces around the landscape unpredictably, fights with the camera, and can sometimes get caught in graphics while painfully struggling over brutal mountain sides. Lucky for everyone, however, is possible to get used it and every other aspect in Mass Effect will make the annoyance seem even less than trivial.
GRAPHICS:
This was a very hot/cold issue for me. The animation and sheer detail of Mass Effect's characters and world are nothing less then jaw dropping...when everything is loaded and working right. Most of the time, everything runs smoothly, but for whatever reason, mostly likely due to the fact that everything must be in real time when scenes are clipped together in rapid succession the biggest issue I've experienced is that the textures with always take and awkward couple of seconds to load onto the models. There, is no real lag and the over all performance definitely makes up for this but it is something that you will definitely notice at times.
SOUND:
Mass Effect definitely gets a 10 here. Unique, motivational music paired with possibly the best voice acting I've ever heard in ANY game. This kind of extreme talent, armed with the knowledge that it was played out on one of Bioware's incredibly diverse conversation system makes one realize just how much effort Bioware placed into making the story come to life.