Consistently Ingenious
Jarod | June 15, 2008Bioware, they are consistently ingenious. Last year they caught me by surprise with the superb Jade Empire, this year they blow me away with Mass Effect (before that they had other hits like KotoR or Baldur’s Gate). I finally beat it, took me about 33 hours in total. While I’ve played longer RPGs, ME keeps the pace high and is more action-oriented anyway. Yes, the side quests are a little dull at times, the (side-)planets similar and empty, but still then the “get the better gun” feeling sets in. And you don’t have to go there.
A lot of people complain about the complicated inventory system. I must say, it never bothered me. I equipped my team during the missions only, and there it worked wonderfully. The character’s faces look fantastic, you can read the moods perfectly, and it always matches the voice acting, too. I encountered a strange bug where I couldn’t talk to two of the crewmembers using a custom key, but I found a solution for that (use the default key). I can think of a few extra controls that would have made it better, like a bulk-delete option for items. I can live with that, considering that the game is about storytelling. And man, the storytelling, the cinematics, it’s like playing a great sci-fi movie, really playing for once…!
I want to play this game again with another class, make other choices, maybe play a nice guy. But at the moment I still identify with Killian Shepard too much and any “nice guy” thoughts seem … wrong. But I’ll definitely go back, just as I did in Jade Empire. Bioware, congrats. To your QA guys, too – even though they overlooked the button thing. I know that feeling 
Build on this, and part 2 will be just perfect (I guess you still agree there Static? 
).
Indeed.
Very good game, played it through twice and im actually looking forward to trying it again in the insanity difficulty setting. That alone says something about the game in my view.
The only negative aspect I’ve seen is the the handling of the vehicle. It doesn’t matter where you take it, it always seems to handle the same way. Hitting minor obstacles can cause it to jump about wildly which gets annoying on some of the planets. The gravity rating on the planets doesn’t seem to affect handling at all.
That aside… great game. Roll on the other 2
Yeah there’s even a shirt in the official shop that says something about the vehicle totally defying real physics, heh.
BTW if you use nHancer or force it in the drivers, you can get the game to run AA and HDR at the same time. The framerate drops a bit, but it looks even awesom-er. Got some nice screenshots ingame that look like renders (from 2 years ago)