I finished Mass Effect last night. Rather than posting a conventional review, I decided to list my likes and dislikes. First, though, a bit of background is in order for the uninitiated (i.e., people who've never heard of ME).

Mass Effect is the latest role-playing game (released for the XBOX360 and later the PC) from Bioware, creators of the Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale series, among others, although it has much more in common, from a gameplay perspective, with Bioware's more recent effort, Jade Empire. The story is set in the far future when humanity has uncovered technological relics of a long-vanished race known as the Protheans in our solar system. These artifacts allow faster-than-light travel to the farthest reaches of the galaxy, where Man discovers that there are many other races already making use of this technology to colonize star systems, engage in petty disputes, and fight galactic wars. As the new kid on the block, humanity is viewed with a combination of skepticism and outright suspicion by the more well-established races as it makes its efforts to find a niche in this new interstellar community. You play the role of Commander Shepard (male or female, depending upon your preference), a human Alliance military officer who is chosen to become the first human Spectre, a group of "James Bond in space"-type figures with a license to kill and wreak mayhem in the name of the greater good and who report only to a three-member governing body known as the Council. It seems that a former Spectre has gone rogue and has uncovered a means of destroying all organic life in the galaxy, which he intends to use. There are reasons and a bit more background than this, but I won't put too many spoilers in this paragraph.

Things I liked about Mass Effect:

1) It's pretty and it sounds great. The visuals are stunning and the incidental sounds, as well as the voice acting (which is present for every major character in the story), are well-done.

2) The story. It's fairly typical space-opera stuff, with a lot of that "you are the only one who can save the galaxy" material, but it's well-written and there are a couple of intriguing twists. The story definitely makes you want to play through to the end to see what happens.

3) The characters. The major characters, including your companions, are well-realized with objectives and ambitions of their own. Occasionally, they will question your actions, and in one part of the story, one of your crew may abandon or attack you, depending on how you handle a particular situation.

Things I didn't like about Mass Effect:

1) The story. What exactly is the purpose of the Reapers' cyclical sweep through the galaxy? I want to know. I have a niggling suspicion we may find out more in later games in this series, as EA has indicated that there will be at least one sequel and the resolution of the story leaves little doubt that there are a lot more stories to be told.

2) The UI. A trend that Bioware has succumbed to over its last several releases is one that I wish it hadn't: the console-ization of the RPG. I haven't played Oblivion very much but it feels more like an FPS than an RPG and it may fall into this category, but that game, Fable, Jade Empire, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Mass Effect all have one thing in common: their console roots show. All of these games tend to play, at least in terms of combat, like a first-person shooter or an action game--something that relies on reflexes rather than tactics and stats to determine the outcome of combat situations. In Mass Effect, you play from a first-person perspective and in combat you use a cross-hair onscreen to target enemies with force powers (I mean, biotics), missile weapons, or tech abilities. There is a "pause mode," which involves HOLDING DOWN the spacebar and selecting actions for yourself and your two companions. I emphasized that point in the sentence above because I don't see a point to having such a mode unless you can at least control the pausing with a toggle of some kind. Having to hold the spacebar with my left hand and scroll around the screen with my right hand picking orders is just ridiculous. If you don't use this mode at all, it plays essentially like a shooter; yes, there are numbers that the computer crunches behind the scenes (damage, hit points, chance to hit) but you are rarely privy to this information.

The inventory system suffers from the same sort of vagaries of origin: you can select different weapons, upgrades, and armors from the pool of items that your party automatically collects from fallen foes, but the only way to find out whether an item you collected is better than what you have equipped is to select it from a long list and cross-reference the stats visually. Moreover, it's difficult to see how many items you're actually carrying at one time unless you tediously scroll through lists for every category. A traditional inventory system would have worked much better. One innovation that actually works pretty well is the idea of omni-gel, a sort of all-purpose goo that can be used to bypass electronic locks or repair your planetary landing vehicle. You get omni-gel by breaking down inventory items you don't want or need. The downside to the economy in the game is that, while you may at some point have more omni-gel than you can possibly use, by the time you're three-quarters of the way through the story, you'll definitely have more money than you can possibly use because no merchants are selling items better than what you can find by killing enemies and looking in containers.

I'm not very good with FPS-type games and I found myself getting killed a lot early on. I switched from normal to easy combat difficulty and I didn't have any problems after that.

3) Waiting. Even on a fast rig with a recent-gen video card, you'll do a lot of walking around and standing in elevators in this game, which are the sort of things that I'm pretty sure no one enjoys. If you're running an older machine with something equivalent to a 7000-series nVidia card, as I was when I first got this game, you'll experience a positively-ludicrous quantity of loading breaks. In walking around the Citadel, one of the major locations in the first part of the game, I could go maybe 30 seconds without experiencing another load break; the timing of my upgrade probably was fortuitous for my chances of finishing the game as I had gotten to the point where I brought a book when I sat down to play.

4) The aliens. While it's nice and sometimes very important to have a familiar frame of reference when exploring a new world, it's unfortunate that so much science fiction in all media has a tendency to imagine aliens in ways that are, well, unimaginative. Most of the races you encounter in Mass Effect will look suspiciously like either humans or animals that are found on Earth. All of them, except for one really big creature, are bilaterally symmetrical. I guess I would just like to see more creative thought put into how life might evolve on other worlds with different climates, resources, atmospheres, gravitational forces, et cetera.

Ultimately, although some of the problems listed above can be very aggravating, especially if you have hardware that just can't handle this game, it's still well worth playing. The story is terrific and engaging and it sounds and looks fantastic.