An excellent RPG that has a few design flaws that keeps it from being a perfect 10
Pros:
Story - Epic scale, nice political/moral basis, loads of spoken dialogue
Game play - Combat is fun, nice combination of spell casting, gun play, and use of cover/squad tactics
Graphics/Sound - Looks awesome, sounds awesome
Misc - Your outfits/weapons change when you put on new gear, and it shows up on you in the cut scenes. Very cool feature.
Cons:
Driving - the Mako sucks and there are TONS of hills
Side Missions - All the side mission bases are recycled from about 6 different models. Gets repetitive, and stands in stark contrast to the effort put into the main storyline worlds
Menus - Incredibly inefficient system to equip yourself and your squad mates, and keep track of gear
Items - Lack of variety means you simply find the best maker of a type of weapon, and upgrade that one brand. The rest of the 100s of items you loot become wasted money because you rarely buy anything.
As you can see, Mass Effect is a great RPG set in a epic story with high production value. But some nagging flaws in certain parts of the game become annoyances and keep it from that perfect 10 rating