Mass Effect Review
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Your created character, Commander Shepard, is an honored hero of humanity that becomes a Specter, an elite galactic agent for the Milky Way's governing body, The Citadel. Shepard's granted this status to pursue Saren, a powerful Turian prowling space for ancient Prothean artifacts for purposes unknown to Shepard and his crew. Without revealing too much, the story is conveyed extremely well -- BioWare's uncanny dialogue engine, coupled with some of the best facial modeling seen in a game, carries Mass Effect to another plane of cinematic storytelling. Saren's scary plans reveal themselves so well with the system the developer's crafted, and it can be said that this is the feature that defines Mass Effect's appeal. Cutscenes are pleasant, welcome engagements that pace the action, party management, and galaxy-roaming perfectly.
Likewise, BioWare did well to avoid confining the player to too many binary dialogue options -- you'll accrue a similar "light/dark" alignment as the game progresses based on your decisions, but the handy dialogue wheel leaves some room for players to define Shepard's personality outside of a measured, point-based system. You won't find more solid storytelling in an RPG, but our one, tiny complaint about the title in this regard is that it's been clearly written with sequels in mind; the scope of the universe the player's allowed to grasp in terms of factions, cultures, and history is relatively limited. Still, the promise of choices made in the first title carrying over via your save file and affecting your character in future games is all too exciting.
