A stunningly effective combination of storytelling, role-playing and intense shooting game-play make this an classic.
All these things describe Mass Effect for the PC. After working out the kinks on my system(close all unnecessary programs prior to play, people!), I managed to play through MEPC and what an experience it was. It was simply a game. Hopscotch is a game, baseball is a game, checkers is a game. Mass Effect is an interactive digital experience.
The game has created a universe wherein the player becomes its greatest hero. It's a science fiction mish-mash of Star Wars, Star Trek, Dune, The Matrix and I, Robot, supplying many moments where you're in awe of the massive world that your avatar inhabits. The sense of wonder lasts throughout the campaign and is not lost on you after the game is finished.
The graphics? Superb, top-notch. You can actually mute the game and understand what the characters are saying if you follow along with the subtitles and watch their lips.
The sound? Equally superb and top-notch. The score, sound effects and voice casting are great all around.
The game-play? Tight, reactive, immersive. The gun-play, biotic and tech attacks are all impressive and feel right. The vehicle mechanics are also tight and responsive.
Now, the game is not perfect by any stretch, but it's still a classic, ranking up there with Assassin's Creed, Bioshock, the Half-Life 2 episodes, Call of Duty 4 and Crysis. It's truly an epic experience.
I do have a few gripes, though, and they are minor.
For the size and scale of the fictional universe that is presented, the actual interactivity and activity within the game spaces are limited.
One of the game's centerpieces is a massive starship which, when standing within it, shows hundreds of square miles of architecture stretching off into the horizon. Unfortunately, where your character can actually go within this massive architecture is very limited. Maybe a little over a dozen locations, most of which are clustered together.
And for a starship that appears to be able to house millions upon millions of inhabitants, the actual foot traffic and denizens are very few. I'd argue that the small villages in Assassin's Creed display far more "people" moving and walking about.
In ME, there's usually only a handful of people walking/standing around. The scale that the game obviously wanted to illustrate wasn't fully executed to the level that, say, a movie like Star Wars would in a similar scene.
And the missions where you travel to different planets isn't as immersive as you'd think. The vast majority of selectable planets appears only as static images with text information slapped on top. Fewer of them can be "surveyed" where you're told that the planet contains different useable minerals and even fewer planets then can actually be landed on.
Once you land on these planets, almost all of them are barren wastelands that consist of very little actual content. You end up traversing long distances where there's nothing to interact with.
I think that, in the end, Mass Effect is a clairvoyant look into what the future of games WILL BE, once computing power allows developers to fully illustrate their imaginations in pixels. The hardware severely limits the potential for games like Mass Effect. ME wants to create an entire universe in which the player can delve into, but current computing power allows only a fraction of that.
One key to the success of the game is, though, that the world presented by the game is an enjoyable one to be in. Few games, even good ones, offer up a world that you WANT to spend hours in. I wanted to LIVE on The Citadel. I wanted to travel the universe in the Normandy. I wanted to spend time with the alien allies and I wanted to kill the game's villains. The game makes you want things and evoking emotion is a powerful skill for any game to have.
I played through Bioshock and, great as it is, I hated the gamespace. The dreary, endlessly depressing halls and chambers. Mass Effect had the opposite effect on me. Rather than a claustrophobic nightmare, Mass Effect offers up open spaces of a dimension and size rarely ever displayed in video games.
It's masterfully executed, extremely fun and incredibly ambitious. But this game. Play this game. It's worth it.