Mass Effect: Dominating my Game Time (By Rebecca "Bonks" Rothschild)

Holy shit! Mass Effect is back and Bioware pulled out all the stops. You ever hear your online friends when they're playing? No you don't, the are long gone, swept up in a great story, damn decent graphics and fluid controls. Sitting there completely enthralled, and more than likely drooling.

I don't like to give too much away when I post up these alerts, but allow me to say a few things. At the very least, I'm going to have to demand that you either rent this, or steal it from a friend.

Looks: It's a sleek, spacey beauty. Smooth, dark filter with juicy hues. On another note, the faces on these characters look good in all lights. No weird deformed looks due to poor shading. Even the ugliest of team members look downright sexy.

The Wheel: Controls are good, they do certainly have a Gears like feel which suits me fine. There's a wheel to select your moves from. I have heard that some think there's too many shooter similarities. I respectfully cannot agree. You can't treat this game like shooter, the action expands way beyond that. The only thing about gameplay that might drive you kinda nuts is how long some of these cut aways are.

The Gang: Oh you'll come to love 'em all. A rag tag team of freaks, killers and clowns. Some character development will overshadow others. Some of the more colorful characters do fall short in development which is probably why they get more of those snappy one liners. Truth be told, there's almost too many cool guys. How's about one mellow dude who really doesn't do much but make the cool guys look cooler. I feel like everyone is competing cool game character of the year.

The Story: It makes sense, you won't get lost, but if you watch Sy Fy, you may have seen this plot before.

Replay Value: You can play through as several characters and behave in all sorts of ways. I gotta say, more often than not, it pays to be bad, but that's just me. This may be the one section where I gotta pump the breaks on the hype. After one time through you DO realize that all decisions make an impact. HOWEVER, after round two it becomes very predictable. Similar to KOTOR, I was soon able to figure out how to work the system which takes away a pretty big chunk of the fun.

All In all I'm gonna give a 8.5/10 sugar cubes. And that's more than enough to sweeten your coffee, go ahead and check this one out.