An awe inspiring and truly epic RPG experience with top class performances, animation, sound and visuals.
The game plays like a 3rd person cover based shooter(with all 4 available weapon types being usable by everyone) with a twist, biotic and engineering powers. Depending on your chosen class depends on which kind of offensive and defensive 'spell' moves you have at your disposal. Think of mass effects offensive spells as being more like ki blasts from dragonball z, big, glowy, lowd and painful looking. Its pretty funny to hit an enemy with throw and see them bounce into a wall or fall off a bridge.
Now you can read/watch any official review of the game and you'll have an idea of what the game looks and sounds like. And I say this in total seriousness, it features some of if not THE best voice acting and facial motion capture I've ever seen in an rpg. Up there with metal gear solid 4, uncharted and heavenly swords brilliant character performances.
That being said if you're not into 'the story' or 'world' that mass effect revolves around then you'll possibly be of the minority that will dislike this game because if you're playing for gameplay alone you will be missing out on what makes this game as good as it is. In light of that I regard the game as more of an interactive visual novel than 'just a game' as absolutely every aspect of mass effect has some kind of explanation, reason, sense, and purpose behind its existence. Even the unexplorable planets have there own statistics and descriptions. I'm still unsure how many there are altogether but considering there's around 30 galaxies with 4 or more star systems in each that's quite alot.
And now to the downside, the repetition or 'overuse' of assets within the game. Play long enough and you'll know exactly what i'm reffering too.
Eventually you will realize that this game, despite its visual qualities reuses ALOT of models/environments. And its obvious little effort was put in to making each unique as it rarely gets more random than say how many crates are in a room, or how many 'extra' corridors lead to 'extra' rooms. The most striking of these is the elevator and door panels all of which are exactly the same, even on the final level(which is visually incredible otherwise) features the same exact green glowing panels and its suppose to be an old abandoned complex so when 99% of it looks how it should and these models don't they stand out like a sore thumb.
Explore enough of Mass Effects worlds and you'll begin to notice that repetition and reuse soon becomes the staple of this games environments. Sadly the same is true for the armor and weapons.
Through the game all your characters will progress though around 8 or so tiers of armor and weapons. Of these there are maybe 4 different models for each with slight texture variations between them.
Of my complaints with the title this reuseage issue is the only real one.
Hopefully the sequel will feature much more diversity and less repetition.
Now I know that rpgs have been doing this and getting away with it for some time but it really is quite odd that 2 or so extra months cant be set aside to add a little more variation here and there, it would make these types of games -that- much more satisfying and rewarding. Luckily one rpg is doing this(silicon knights Too Human), and could very well start a new trend if we're lucky.
All that aside the game is uber fun to play, rarely has technical issues( i ran into none myself) and the only real bug seems to be character pathing. Its somewhat lacking but never game breaking.
The PC port isn't very different from the 360 version aside from some minor UI changes(much better suited for PC) and the obvious higher res textures/faster load times that naturally come with pc ports.
All in all a truly amazing game and its given me a good feeling about the future of the rpg genre and I CAN NOT WAIT for mass effect 2.