The Game World

Mass Effect is (if you stay off the side quests – more on this later), a fully fleshed out universe, with a detailed history of all of the races you encounter. As you gather information your codex fills up allowing you to read (or in the case of the main entries listen to) greater details about everything you see around you. The main quests take you through a variety of different worlds each with their own weather systems which may prevent different challenges of their own.

Character Generation

The character generation tool is a pretty standard part of an RPG nowadays, so I feel I should take a few words to mention it. You start off by choosing your gender (male or female), name, your origin and your background/psychological profile and then your class. Once you've picked these you then get to create your face. However, if you have already played the game and unlocked some achievements you get an option to add a skill from another class to your chosen class (as long as it's one you've unlocked). Other than the class there is little affect on the game from these choices, your background opens up another specific side quest for you to do (the colonist being the strongest of these for me) and your background can change conversations slightly at certain points, but other than this and a few bonuses to the paragon or renegade morality (more on this later) you won't notice any difference.

Characterisation

As you'd expect from a BioWare game, this is one of the strongest aspects, as long as you take the time with it. Sure, you can go through the game without speaking to your crew, but you won't get to know them. Take the time to speak to them and you'll learn why they are as they are, each one has their own opinions and with subtle prodding they can sometimes be brought around to your way of thinking. I actually found myself coming to like my crew, especially the mercenary Wrex. It was always fun talking to him and hearing stories of his life before he signed on with Shepard.

Morality

What would a BioWare game be without some sort of morality system? In this one, as you have to save the galaxy, you get a choice between paragon (do-gooder) and renegade (asshole). Other than choosing which alignment mission you do, the morality has very little visible outcome, only in the way the council and the ambassador deal with you. Instead, this is apparently saved for an effect on the future games in the series.

Story

The story is the games strongest point. After a slow start that introduces you to the game you're thrust deep in to a tale of galactic politics and saving the known galaxy from the greatest threat it's ever encountered. The choices you make, as I've already stated, have little visible effect in this chapter but if BioWare are to be believed, then this will carry over and be visible in Mass Effect 2 and 3.

Side Quests

Possibly the weakest part of the game. Many of the side quests feel repetitive and cookie cutter with just a case of go here and do that. However, there are a few stand out quests, the most notable being Listening Post Alpha and Lost Freighter. I'm not going to go in to details of these as they're at their strongest when you know nothing about them. The only problem is, they're ones you just have to stumble upon whilst exploring so many people will miss them. More side quests of this quality would have been very welcome.

Negatives

The biggest complaint here is the fairly indetikit side quest worlds you can choose to visit. These have you driving over a limited often extremely rocky terrain in your standard alliance vehicle, the Mako. The vehicle that is a negative for many people who have played the game but one that I personally had no problems with it, my problems were with the mountainous terrain and the fact I would often end up trying to drive up something to steep.
The main story is also fairly short, if you know what you're doing and just choose to focus on it, then it's possible to complete it in under 10 hours, which for an RPG is lacking. I managed to run a level 60 character through on the hardest difficulty in 8 hours. However, if you're only playing the main quest, then maybe RPGs aren't the genre for you.
The final complaints are fairly minor in my opinion. There can be a lot of texture pop up with models appearing and then the texture being drawn over them a few seconds later, sometimes after you've taken control and at certain times longish load times. Generally however, these load times are masked by elevator trips, the majority of which, other than the one on your ship, The Normandy, are handled fairly well, with the elevators appearing to move at speed through long shafts.

Bring Down The Sky – DLC

Bring Down The Sky adds a new quest to the game which unfortunately is set on a rocky asteroid. This does bring down the overall enjoyment but the quest itself is fairly strong forcing you to make a moral choice right at the end. It's a worthy addition to the game, if you can overlook yet another rocky terrain area.

Pinnacle Station – DLC

Pinnacle Station was the second piece of DLC released for the game and fortunately avoids the rocky terrain exploration. Instead you get an arena to fight in carrying out different simulated missions. The missions have a bit of variance with three in each of four categories (time trial, survival, hunt and capture the point) but overall they just boil down to killing as much of your selected enemy as you can. The main problem I found with this DLC was that at higher levels on the harder difficulty some missions (especially the time trials) become impossible to do. I was running a level 60 character though on the insanity difficulty and it was not possible to achieve the required time trial scores due to the enemies effectively being bullet sponges.

Conclusion

Mass Effect is definitely right at the top of my games list, at the time of release it was my favourite game of all time and since has only been surpassed by another BioWare release – Dragon Age: Origins. Now, I'll be the first to admit that I'm a massive BioWare fan so may have a little bias towards their games, but any game that can have me completing it 8 times (especially when most runs last over 30 hours) has to have something going for it. The story especially makes this a compelling first chapter in the Mass Effect space opera. It's a game I would definitely recommend for any RPG fans and a must have for fellow BioWare fans.