Mass of Effective Awesomeness.
RPG's are one of the hardest type of games to get into. Due to their usually lengthy Story, very involved gameplay and numerous quests, you either fall for it hard or you give up in the first hour or so.
With this game being the biggest reason I got an 360, I was pretty afraid I'd be sorely disappointed by it. But over a hundred hours, 4 characters and 1050 achievement points later I think I can safely say this game blew me and my tiny little mind away.
Since the story is detailed on the main gamepage I'm not gonna go into too much detail. You play as a SPECTER named Shepard who has to track down a Rouge SPECTRE named Saren who's using a army of synthetic dudes called "the Geth" to look for something. What that thing is and why he's doing it is up to you to find out.
It's safe to say that the story and exspecially the dialouge are the best things about this game. Instead of opting for the usual "Humanity finds aliens and they fight", Bioware has created a..... ugh "rich fiction" about the history of the races and how they all interact wiht eachother. Each of dose or so speacies have a detailed description of their background, political viepoints, general behaviour, ecenomy etc etc.
You really feel like the species are real, they have their pros and cons and with the Council being reletively new you feel like not everyone is getting along.
The conversation wheel is probably the biggest this game has. There is a learning curve for how the conversations work but after 1 playthrough or so you'll be able to dance through every conversation no problem. add top-notch writing, great characters and believable voicework and you've got a solid gameplay mechanic.
Unfortunaly, this game is bogged down by alright shooting, some painfull design decisions and a host of bugs wich have turned many players away from ever finishing this game. The shooting is clunky at times, sometimes you're just ahnihilating your opponets with a pistol but a few moments later they make mincemeat out of you while your assault riffle does almost nothing to them. But thankfully biotic and tech ability's make up for that (most of the time) with fun and effective abilities.
The main vehicle in this game, the Mako, suffers from some of those problems with the varying difficulty but thanks to it's wonky handling and awful, awful turret controls the vehicle parts become one of the most annoying parts in the game.
The design issues don't stop there. Coupled with the sometimes infuriating combat is the most useless and broken autosave system in any game game made. Save points are few and far between and with the ability to save anywhere you want outside of combat it's practically useless. If you forget to save often you can loose almost a hour of progress wich is pretty much inexcuseable.
The inventory system is a hassle to manage and it is so hard to maintain order there that most player will probably never know how it even works at all.
And to top it all of, there are a bunch of techincal issues (this is running on UE3, mind you) like texture pop-ins. frequent framerate drops, system lock-ups and loooooooong load times
But despite all that I adore this game. I haven't been so intrigued and amazed by a game since Ocarina Of Time and no ammount of texture pop-ins and 3 week long elevator rides can spoil that. There is absolulely no guaranty you'll like this game, even if you liked every other game Biowares done you are just as likely to hate it. But who knows, maybe you'll be just as amazed by this game as I was.
