Lengthy Introduction
After year twelve ended, "Mass Effect" was almost top on the list of games I absolutely need to play. Why? Because it was developed by bioware. Young gamers probably don't even know why I worship bioware. They've made disasters like Knights of the Old Republic and Neverwinter Nights, comparitively good RPGs, but not good games when compared to other genres. I had to play bioware's game because they developed Baldur's Gate.

Baldur's Gate is one of those games that made the 90's a golden age of gaming. Think about it, the Nintendo 64 in all it's glory was in the late 90's. 1997; StarCraft, the RTS that took over a nation in it's glory. Doom (), Dark-Forces (first Star Wars game, first FPS with planes stacked on top of each other), Quake (quake engine was a major innovator in 3D environments), Half-Life (a revamp of the Quake engine that produced a FPS engine that produced numerous amazing games/mods such as Counter-Strike), and other classic innovating FPSs. Baldur's Gate brought back the RPG genre from the brink of extinction. The text adventures were obsolete and no computer could possibly handle a RPG in a 3D engine, which was becoming the standard for gaming in the late 90's. Baldur's Gate was completely sprite based. Now lets put this into context, Baldur's Gate is HUGE! Not only geographically, but in the amount of quests and NPCs as well. The NPCs mostly spoke only in text, only important ones actually having audio tracks for their dialogue. But, this allowed a game which to this day, I believe, has the most comprehensive amount of NPC dialogue ever. Almost every NPC had unique dialogue, many of this dialogue leading to a quest of some description. What's more, the dialogue was REALLY well written. Every so often you find an NPC which is just hilarious to talk to (e.g. every single conversation with the mighty Minsc). The plot itself was amazingly written, it is epic on epic proportions and doesn't sacrifice any seriousness through it. Voice acting was brilliant.

Anyway, I've digressed rather severely. Hopefully I have sufficiently explained that Baldur's Gate was amazing, and I thus have an enormous respect for Bioware. So! How did the actual game go? I haven't actually finished it yet, so in terms of plot I probably won't be saying much. This review is rather a first impression.

Gameplay
*drools* The gameplay is excellent. Really, really good. Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, KotOR and the like loosely based on DnD rules (Baldur's Gate more strictly so). This means quite a bit to anyone who plays DnD. It means that, the combat is largely boring for a fighter type character. You tell them to attack, they do so until the enemies are dead. Mass Effect however completely breaks this rule. It deviates from DnD style rules in creating a shooter game. While you find yourself going through the inventory upgrading weapons like in KotOR, you also find yourself using a GTA IV style cover system, using a sniper rifle and basically using your pro skills in combination with your strategic use of party and equipment.

If you want to be more strategic about it, you can. You can go into a menu which allows you to issue commands to your party to cast biotic (arcane) spells or use technition (rogue) abilities to your advantage. However, the 'move' command isn't so good, so I usually avoid it. When I go into the menu it is almost exclusively to use arcane spells to my advantage (I REFUSE TO SUBMIT TO THEIR SCI-FI EUPHEMISMS!).

The classes are fairly simple, you can basically be a fighter, rogue, or sorceror (to put it into terms you RPG vets will understand). You can also do multiclass variations. I myself choose a fighter/rogue, which basically makes me a sniper who can pick locks and heal my party members (I don't know why the rogues are healers rather than the sorcerors, not a particularly standard choice). I have been ok with it, but I feel the game tends to favour biotic players, as the characters which are favoured in all the trailers and promotional material lack biotic abilities.

Morality System, or "Alignment"
My Juno I love the alignment system in this game. If you've played other bioware RPGs you know that they usually have a progression between good and evil. You are good, evil, or somewhere in between according to most RPG games. This one is much more interesting. You can get points toward the Paragon (good) 'and' Renegade (evil) without detrimenting the other. This is a duly recognition that not all characters will respond the exact same way to all situations. Unlike KotOR, I don't think you can be a "MWAHAHAHAHA" sort of evil character. I think the most evil you can get is a "Dirty Harry" equivalent ("Give me your badge!" | "What you got yourself their is a seven point suppository." | "What did you say to me?!" | "I said you can stick it up your ass."), a good character who has no regard for the rules. Instead of silly goodguy/badguy options this game provides truly interesting morality issues. For example; a man's wife was in the marine core, she died. The military refuses to return the body while they are doing intrusive tests and experiments on the corpse. The man wants her to have a proper burial. But, these tests could potentially save many, many living soldiers in the coming conflict. Do you give the woman her dignity and the man some closure? Or do you side with the greater good provided to the living? Both argue their points rather persuasively leaving a difficult option, neither favouring the good or evil alignment. This morality system is much more mature and interesting than most RPGs and I highly approve of it.

ZOMFG
CARTH ONASI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! One the first party member is voiced by the same guy who voiced Carth Onasi from Knights of the Old Republic! Fricking awesome!

Overall comments
Like most modern RPGs, I get no sense of epicness in supposedly epic places. To paraphrase PCPP, when you see Damascus for the first time in Assassin's Creed you are overcome with the epicness of the city; you just know this is going to be awesome. When you see the place which is supposedly the centre of galactic politics, the core of the entire galaxy, it is an extremely meh moment. The NPCs are too sparse and the environment is closed and has a suprisingly cramped feeling for such an open area. The environment is just so... meh.

Too much dialogue. No, that is wrong. There is not an excess of dialogue, just a lack of fighting! If I could just have 3 or 4 more bounty hunters trying to kill me in every area I would be a happy chappy with no complaints in this area. I went like an hour or so with absolutely no fighting doing mundane quests. It made me very sad. It would have been so easy just to add a few more random NPC enemies, they did it only once on the major system which left me very deprived of action. By doing it once they proved that they could do it, they clearly didn't put much effort into that encounter, why didn't they make more? Hopefully the next systems will be more interesting, but I'm not hopeful.

Game developers fail to recognise that many gamers will be scientifically educated. Assassins Creed was terrible in this regard, thinking we'd look past triple bonded hydrogens and the like. I was looking at a system's orbital information. Radius: 0.9 AU, year: 0.9 Earth years. I instantly thought back to Kepler's equations, remembered that radius is not directly proportional to period (more like r^2 is proportional to T^3) and became rather upset that they made this mistake.

Conclusion
I am enjoying it, and intend to have a second play through soon after (as a biotic ). Enough said.