What the snarf?! :shock: GME is writing a review for the first time since Lost Planet!!! Yeah I figured it was time to throw my hat back into the ring. And taking notes form Ragnars excellent blogs ive even thrown in some pictures for the ADD elite. *glares at Valek* Keep in mind im no professional, and its been almost a year since I did this. but here are my two cents on Mass Effect. "Let us start from the beginning... ... human.. Mass Effect is a sci/fi rpg set in the distant future where humanity has recently discovered faster than light speed travel. What they find is a galaxy governed by a council of alien races, and that they are short in the pecking order of things. The graphics are excellent, as is the overall presentation. The character models are exceptionally well done, and the voice acting is top notch. It topples Half Life 2 for realistic character models, talking and voice acting. It is the best I have ever seen. While not spoiling too much of the plot (definetly the games strongpoint) you must track a rouge council agent after he wipes out a human colony you were sent to investigate. What proceeds is 20-40 hrs of high political drama and nail biting decisions on your half. You can choose in most cases to either help, hinder or ignore people. The emphasis is definetly on picking either the "Paragon" (good) or Renegade (not so good) path. Its not hard to distinguish which choice in the dialog tree is which as the top choice is always Paragon, while the middle is just that... the middle and the bottom choice is Renegade. This allows for at least two different experiences/playthroughs of the game... as your different choices, in different scenarios change the way the game unfolds. You start off in a fantastic character editor where you can sculpt your characters face to your liking. It is really a detailed editor and allows you to create a very realistic looking character. Whats even more neat is the background traits you choose here. Some examples are "Ruthless" and "War Hero" different parts of your character history you can mould to your liking. Whats impressive about this is that these background traits are integrated into a large quantity of the game, dialog and sidequests. Some backgrounds even open up unique sidequest on their own, really again giving emphasis on some replayability. Now is your chance to finally nail a smurf!!! The gameplay is tight but suffers in a few areas. Combat is in a third person shooter perspective and mostly resembles Gears Of War in its stop and pop style of shooting. The battles on the normal difficulty fall a bit on the easy side for any verteran gamer but ramp up nicely on the hardcore or insanity settings. Combat on any difficulty is well done, and a strongpoint for the game. On foot combat that is. Another part of the game has you for a good chunk of your time, and many battles in the mako some kind of futuristic tank. The tank controls ok while you are just driving around but in combat it becomes annoying and frustrating as your canno can move side to side and not up and down. So, a lot of times you are firing into a hill/mountain/enemy base while ground troops pelt you with rockets. Expect some annoying deaths until you learn to stay on level ground the hard way. I had a smurf once. She turned my genitals blue and that is why I want to destroy all life!! raaarrr!!! Another emphasis of the game is its exploration. While it seems daunting at first it quickly becomes repetitious and boring. You can choose from many different clusters of planets to explore. But in each cluster there is only one planet to explore, the rest are useless facts about how much hydrogen it contains, and what the temperature is there. Ok.... it makes the game feel empty and unfinished. On the one planet per cluster you can explore it usually contains 2-3 fetch quest items to pick up and a base of some kind to explore (mercenaries, scientific etc) the problem here is that there are three different templates for these sideworld findings and they all repeat....over... and over. Not only is this annoying, it makes most of the sidequest monotonous and boring. In fact I honestly recomend skipping them altogether and sticking to the fantastic main game, which is well varied, paced well and has an awesome story. Overall the game is a strong reccomend for any rpg fan. But exploring the galaxy needs to be a lot more exciting if the sequel is to elevate the franchise to the upper echelons of gaming nirvana.