Pros: Fantastic plot and setting, stellar acting, awesome combat system and role-playing
Cons: Glitchy graphics, tedious vehicular combat and exploration, awful inventory system
The bottom line: A magnificent achievement in interactive entertainment, with some surprisingly severe problems mucking up the brilliance.
I have no idea how to review this game. It's two parts brilliant, and one part botched. It is such a perplexing mix of excellent and half-baked that a simple numerical score doesn't make any sense.

But I do know this... I've never been so thoroughly drawn in to such a problematic game. For me, Mass Effect was a wonderful experience, and one of the most rewarding video game purchases I've made all year. But there is so much glaring room for improvement and refinement that I can't help but feel that in a few years, it will be completely forgotten and hopelessly outdated -- perhaps even by its own sequels.

This is not a game for casual players. This is a game for expert gamers who are curious to see an experiment in something different. Mass Effect is the next generation in interactive storytelling and virtual acting, and offers some fascinating new play mechanics that valiantly try to combine squad-based action and traditional role-playing. But it is also throws unsuspecting players to the wolves with a daunting learning curve and a laughable help system, inconsistent and occasionally broken play mechanics, and one of the most atrocious inventory systems in video game history.

Is it worth playing? I want to say yes, but it's not a blanket recommendation. This isn't for everybody. It may not even be for most.

Gameplay:

Gameplay is broken up into so many disparate pieces that a simple summary is inadequate to really convey what happens in Mass Effect.

The overall layout of the game is reminiscent of classic console Role Playing Games, with your character exploring various cities, speaking to pre-placed characters that offer various quests and services. Conversation is remarkably interactive, allowing the player to dig for information, or to cut the conversation short if a simple answer is desired. Although the basic plot skeleton doesn't deviate much, your choices do change the details and character of your experience. The game (somewhat artificially) splits decisions into good "paragon" and bad "renegade" camps. These decisions alter the way other characters regard you, and may permit or prohibit various side quests and missions.

Most missions incorporate squad-based third-person action, superficially similar to Gears of War. Battles play out in real time, and you must physically aim your weapon. Special abilities (for both you and your squad) are activated by using the bumper triggers as "shift" keys, and then selecting options from a circular menu. Shifting pauses the action, but allows you the freedom to adjust your aim and select individual targets. All this stop-and-go may offend fans of pure action, but it works surprisingly well, and you'll likely enjoy the uniquely staccato pace that results. Squad mates operate under an adjustable free-will setting, but you can activate their abilities manually at any time. The action is suitably intense and very enjoyable, and you'll frequently find yourself juggling as you get swarmed by ten or so enemies.

Other missions take place in the Mako -- the seeming offspring of a lunar rover and an Abrams tank, with installed jump-jets for good measure. The Mako can be set down on suitable planetary surfaces, and allows free exploration of uncharted lands. The Mako can engage targets directly using its mounted cannon, or the party can exit and fight in the more traditional manner.

Between all this, you'll spend a good amount of time on-board your ship, The Normandy. You have free reign to roam the decks, speaking with crewmates to further the plot, or just to get their takes on current events. On your bridge, you can access a large holographic map that lets you chart new courses, and survey or land on new planets. Each planet comes with a detailed description that is usually superfluous, but adds a touch more realism and substance to the proceedings.

Role-playing elements are handled through a standard experience system, and you are allotted a certain number of skill points every time you level up. Your entire crew levels up at once -- regardless of whether or not they are currently in your party. You can spend these points to upgrade your armor, gain skill in a particular weapon, learn new "biotic" spells, and otherwise improve your character's abilities for battle later on.

There is a ton going on in Mass Effect, and its ambition is often justified by the result.

What's Right:

Perhaps the most ambitious undertaking is the sheer amount of plot and conversational variation provided to the player. A thorough player may have a 30-hour experience, with a huge portion representing spoken dialogue. Even simple conversations provide a spectacular array of choices which allow you to steer discussion in ways that vary from subtle to sweeping. Information hounds are free to dig for additional details, which are provided amply. Those more interested in getting on with it can forgo the chat, and stick with the basics.

More impressive is the fact that all this branching conversation is fully voice-acted, and of consistently high quality. While most games bore with their endless cut-scenes, Mass Effect fascinates. Clunkers are happily rare (although not absent), and the cast submits a solid performance all around. On occasion, a spoken line will sound a bit detached from the conversation, clearly recorded out of context. But considering the technical demands of recording such a complex web of speech choices, I'm left insanely impressed.

Digging for details is generally encouraged, as Bioware has done a great job of populating and fleshing out this new science-ficion universe. It borrows liberally from other franchises (with Star Wars, Star Trek, and Battlestar Galactica getting more than subtle nods). But it brings enough new ideas to the table to stand on its own merits, and sci-fi fans will enjoy learning about this vision of space. A Codex can be accessed at any time, and is absolutely swelling with detailed information which is so well-written that it is legitimately fun to read, and you can easily (and happily) donate hours to simple research.

The many different species of alien life all have their roles to play in a nicely mapped social and political system, with deep histories of war and alliance that directly impact the interpersonal relationships you'll witness along your journey. Your Krogan squad mate still harbors resentment against his Turian comrade for past acts of war (the details of which are too interesting to spoil here). Your Quarian teammate needs to live with her peoples' stigma of producing the Geth machines that threaten to overtake the universe. The resulting themes of racial tension and prejudice are not ignored, and you will frequently be called on to mediate such discussions, and provide your own input.

Other games have tried to provide the player with such social interactions, but this is easily the most successful. When Deus Ex 2 tried this five years ago, it came across as a gimmick and a dodge, with your choices never really registering a true impact on the world. Mass Effect is in another league entirely, with deep, nuanced conversations that branch in countless directions and genuinely alter the outcome of events. And the excellent voice-acting is icing on the cake.

I enjoyed the relative freedom in exploring the universe, beginning with the fairly extensive character customization system. Your version of the main character (known as Shepard) can be male or female, with a solid array of sliders and options to tweak his/her appearance. Shepard can specialize in six different classes, which represent various degrees of ability in combat, biotics (spellcasting), and tech skills. You can even choose a backstory!

Once turned loose into the world, your new Shepard is effectively free to do anything after the first mission. Being able to travel from planet-to-planet at my own pace, and responding to missions and side quests in whatever order made me happy. Although the game's core missions are all revealed at the outset, you don't have to pursue them until you feel ready. I often delayed the next "big" mission in order to pursue more modest assignements in order to bolster my experience and better flesh out the world. Careful exploration will reveal many optional quests that may be completed locally, or may require you to sail halfway across the galaxy.

Although the pure combat wasn't as tight as Gears of War, it was often more enjoyable due to the fun juggling of varied powers used to bring enemies to their knees. It's extremely satisfying to have one squad mate burn an enemy's shields, leaving you to lift the bad guy with your biotics, and then watching your other comrade blow him out of the air with his shotgun. Such orchestrations are produced on the fly, and absolutely depend on the unique battle controls. The tension and excitement of battles makes it fun to watch your character grow, adding new techniques and abilities to the arsenal, and finding ways to incorporate them into your tactics.

The clever marriage of role-playing elements with real-time firefights is like nothing I've seen before, and goes a long way towards making this game so great.

I just wish there weren't so many other problems...

What's Wrong:

Despite the mass doses of brilliance, there are entire sections of the game that reek of laziness and insufficent development. These things are compounded by a profoundly inaccessible brand of gameplay that will leave less experienced players in complete disarray.

Left to Die:

Mass Effect starts full of promise, with some great cinematics and a nice beginner firefight. Helpful tutorial bubbles begin to teach the basics of physical combat, and it looks like things will go just fine.

But, rather suddenly, the tutorial turns off, and the firefights become much more difficult. Difficult to the point of seeming impossible. Early in the game, it's not clear how everybody's abilities are meant to play together and you'll repeatedly see the game over screen. In a sense, the game initially falls victim to its ambition... it introduces something completely new, but forgets to tell you how to use it.

Once you get through the battle, you find yourself somewhat adrift in a dauntingly large city where you have free reign to go and do what you want. The freedom is welcome, but it's a lot to absorb all at once. Meanwhile, your journal is filling at an alarming rate, and it's full of unbelievably detailed information about countless places and species, and it's hard to figure out which information is necessary and which is for flavor.

It's overwhelming, even for someone who has been playing games for the past twenty years. And I really hope that it doesn't turn gamers towards the power button, because the game beyond these growing pains is just so good. Eventually, you'll come to value the elaborate controls and the encyclopedic collection of information, but it wallops you right out the gate. I think Bioware would have been wise to slow down the pace a little, and maybe offer a more complete combat tutorial (make it an optional holodeck kind of thing, so experienced players don't feel trapped in a boring lesson).

Mako Jumps the Shark:

While the role-playing and combat are generally excellent, attempts to expand the universe in other ways often fall flat. Your first few moments in the Mako are ripe with promise, but it doesn't take long to realize what a dodge it is. You're given entire planets, and they are completely barren except for two buildings and a downed satellite. The planet descriptions bother to list the local gravity conditions, but the Mako handles the same on the Moon as it does on a giant planet. Except for the new textures, there's nothing to differentiate planets.

You're left with nothing to do other than grapple over the gratuitously rocky terrain, trying to get to that orange blip on your map. I don't know what all the mountains are for, since your vehicle can climb anything, so they only serve to make the drive more irritating. Seriously, you will scale nearly vertical surfaces. The jump-jets should make it easier to navigate the terrain, but actually just tend to launch you in the wrong direction (they always "lift" you perpendicular to the surface you're on, which usually pushes you backwards), so you'll never use those either. But all of this is just time-wasting nuisance while you try to get to that stupid blip. The Mako is fun to drive... they just don't give you anything to do in it.

Once there, you may find a few enemies that you can try to kill with your cannon. But it doesn't really work right. Inexplicably, your cannon only fires where your reticle is pointing about half the time. You've got your reticle centered on some Geth behemoth, but your shells are attacking the mountain in the distance. Same goes for you chain guns, which are borderline useless. Trying to take out a missile turret at range is a frustrating process of trial-and-error firing, while you get brutally pelted with explosives.

If you're really unlucky, you'll run into a Thresher Maw -- one of the sandworms from Dune with a few parts tacked on, and the ability to spit acid. These battles should be fun, but they're just frustrating. Apart from the fact that you can barely aim your cannon, the creature tends to tunnel up directly beneath you, instantly ending your game without leaving you any recourse.

The Mako seems fun for two minutes, and could have been a cool homage to the classic Moon Patrol. But these gameplay segments seem to have wandered over from another game, and the vehicular combat mechanics are not just poor, but legitimately broken.

Planets, Planets Everywhere...

Your navigation map is absolutely loaded with different planets to explore, but this plus turns out to be a minus. Unfortunately, you can only land on a tiny handful of them. Most planets are just a text box with no actions to perform, adding clutter to the map screen and making it harder to find your real destination. Some offer the option to "survey" the planet, which is accomplished by hitting "A" and reading the text. That's it. Very adventurous. Unfortunately, there are a few "collection" missions that pretty much boil down to clicking on every planet at some point. Sigh.

The navigation map, however cool it looks, is completely overdesigned for what it does. You have to zoom in and out of clusters and solar systems, trying to pinpoint your destination. Considering that maybe 10% of the available destinations are actual landing sites, 90% of the map is a complete distraction. And since things aren't arranged in any alphabetical or other logical order, there can be some frustration in locating the site of a particular mission.

I Know it's In Here Somewhere:

Write this sentence down on a sheet of paper, and mail it to Bioware's offices: Mass Effect has the most god-awful inventory and equipment system ever used in a party-based RPG.

I'm not kidding. The old SNES Final Fantasy games did a better job of keeping your things in order. Everything you collect is in one big pile. Items don't stack, and they aren't sorted by size, type, level, or which characters can use them. It's just a pile. There is no convenient way of scanning your inventory for the best items available. What a mess. Even more annoying is when you first go to your equipment screen after auto-looting a battlefield full of enemies... every single item obtained is lumped together, and shoved into your inventory at once. It's completely untamed.

Extraneous items can be sold or "melted down" to an all purpose "omni-gel" which is used to repair the Mako, or to open locks if you can't figure out how to operate the foolishly easy mini game that you have to play to open lockers and crates. But finding which items you want to sell and melt down is such a chore... you're always worried that you might be selling something that another character can use (you can't check on comrades who aren't currently in your party). And since everything uses the same names, differentiated only by appended roman numerals, it becomes a jumble really fast.

Why's it all So Complicated?

And I'm still not sure why every character lugs around four large guns, considering most of the classes can only train to use one or two. Does my Adept have the ability to equip Assault Rifles just to tease me? And why have all these guns anyway? I never found any tactical difference between the Shotgun and the Sniper Rifle, since I can't direct my squad mates to snipe anybody anyway. If they're armed with a Sniper Rifle, they just use it in regular short-range combat. The only way to truly snipe is to make your character a sniper, but most classes don't allow for it. It makes no sense at all.

Meanwhile, items and abilities often have perplexing descriptions. My new armor upgrade has "+ 15% Hardening." My new ability has an "Accuracy Cost" of 80%. What the hell do these things mean? These stats aren't mentioned anywhere else... are these good or bad?

Ergonomics:

And then there are some questionable control decisions. Like mapping your grenades to the "Select" button (is this a cute homage to Punch Out?). Or the fact that in some menus the B button backs up a level, while in others it causes you to exit the menu entirely (you were supposed to use X instead). Or the fact that accessing my map from the Mako (which you need to do very frequently) requires me to dig one level deep in a menu (this, Bioware, would have been a good use for that "Select" button).

Most of these issues are not nitpicks. They are fundamental flaws and oversights in the game design which significantly damage the overall integrity of the product, no matter how excellent and ambitious the game might otherwise be. While the steep learning curve is eventually surmountable, the other issues are permanent. I suspect that Bioware simply bit off more than they could chew, and decided to focus their efforts on the more interesting parts of the beast they created. The excellent combat and role-playing stand in such blinding contrast to the phoned-in Mako segments that you have to imagine they farmed it out to a completely different studio.

Graphics:

The graphics are simultaneously amazing and disappointing, and I'm not sure what to think. By most standards, the graphics are extraordinary, with obscenely detailed character models and some gorgeous environments. Lighting and bump-mapping effects are liberally applied to spectacular effect. And the game displays some of the best lip-syncing I've ever witnessed, which is a blessing given the copious amounts of speech.

It is worth mentioning that, as graphics become more realistic, it becomes easier to notice what looks wrong as opposed to what looks right. Mass Effect's human characters look just real enough to be creepy, and always seem a little detached and haunted. Aliens fare better, probably because we don't have any prior reference point against which to compare them. Still, reviews comparing Mass Effect's graphics to Pixar movies can charitably be described as hyperbolic.

All this realism comes with big problems, regardless. There are graphical glitches and framerate issues nearly every single moment of the game. Every time the camera changes perspective, you'll watch bland textures gradually "pop" into more impressive ones, sometimes over the course of ten seconds or so. It's terribly distracting.

Some will argue that the graphics aren't as important as the gameplay. This may have been true in a fast game like Gears of War (which was plagued with a similar problem). But Mass Effect was designed as a cinematic experience, and the camera is more likely to linger, so the visuals are paramount. If Jurassic Park's Tyrannosaur intermittently looked like a crude model, we wouldn't say "it's ok.. the plot is more important than the graphics." It would terminate the experience by removing you from it. Some texture pop and framerate issues are understandable in a system-pushing game. But when they manifest in every single scene, it means ambition has gone too far, and the design team could have used a pragmatist on board.

The game also constantly shoehorns you through the slowest elevators ever designed, not-so-subtly disguising the loading times (which is funny, because there are a thousand other places where it just freezes the game-in-progress to load). I actually stopped talking to some of my crewmates below deck, because I just didn't want to deal with getting in the glacially slow elevator that took me there. It's almost audacious that the game provides you with cheesy muzak and little fidget animations, just to remind you how boring this is.

I appreciate the desire to push technology, but I'm a firm believer that software should be written for the platform it's running on, and not despite it. Either the engine needs an overhaul, or the game shouldn't be running on the 360. Perhaps Microsoft deserves some of the blame for insisting that the game not require hard drive support, which could have prevented constant disc streaming. My game crashed the system with relatively frequent disc-read errors, which I suspect is actually a defect of the 360, exacerbated by more-frequent-than-usual disc spinning.

All this said... when it's not glitching, the graphics are technically beautiful. Watching the Normandy come in to dock is amazing. Seeing the Mako descend onto a planet surface, sillouhetted against the setting sun, is exhilarating (even if it means you're going to be stuck in the damn Mako again). The art direction is generally good, if not generic at times. But the main Citadel city is a sight to behold, and some of the alien life is extremely well conceived.

Summary:

I'm giving Mass Effect some tough love, and I almost feel bad. What Bioware has crafted here is exceptional, and should serve as a beacon to every other developer content to crank out the same old thing. They should be thanked for giving us something which is new and exciting, and of generally high quality. But the problems can't be overlooked, because they continually distract from an otherwise extraordinary achievement.

As a long-time gamer, I can see through the clutter, and recognize what has been accomplished here. For every gripe, there is a spectacular set-piece that works hard to redeem it. Mass Effect is one of the best gaming experiences I've had all year. But newbies and casual players should know, going in, they they will need to chew on some gristle and fat before they get to the grade-A meat within.

Mass Effect is primed to become a great franchise, and I hope that Bioware can refine this creation and let it grow into what it's capable of being. A few tweaks, and the sequel may be unassailable. Hopefully, with the basic framework in place, Bioware will have the time and resources to improve the Mako sequences (which could be awesome if they wanted to be) and tighten the inventory issues before granting us the sequel. But as it stands, this role-playing adventure needed to spend a little more time leveling up before heading out to battle.