Major disappointment. Delivers on about half of it's potential and promises from the developer.
Combat is pretty fun, the baddies react in entertaining ways when you kick their asses. Story is cool and you get hang out with some cool characters.
Ok, all the stuff now.
Graphics, graphics range from passable to horrendous. The texture pop-in is so bad that often you don't get the correct full res texture until a split second before it leaves the screen anyway. We're talking about early PS2 level visuals here, for about 70% of the game.
Driving is passable but boring. They should have taken a note from HL2 to see how to make driving fun in a non-driving game.
World exploration is the biggest ball dropped. They didn't just drop the ball, it fell through the floor far into the ground. The worlds are, essentially, EXACTLY the same. The only real difference is the texture map. That's it! It's just super bumpy/hilly landscape. A few different designs for bases, a few as in 2 or 3. Once you've been to one world, you've been to them all.
On that note, alot of the side quests are boring, especially the ones not initiated via character interaction. You can get some fun ones, with neat twists, but there's alot of 'go to A, open box, return to B'.
RPG elements are lame. No item collecting, just weapon/armor gathering. Linear progression of weapon and armor quality. Leveling up doesn't ever lead to any huge breakthroughs in ability. You just do more damage and can take more damage.
Overall, take the greatness that is KOTOR 1 or 2, cut it in half and you've got Mass Effect. You get far smaller environments, and far fewer to explore, far fewer characters to interact with, drastically stunted RPG components, and graphics that are most often WORSE that KOTOR because of the texture problems.
I never would have thought that Bioware would disappoint this much. But it's finally happened. It's a damn shame.