tuftears | Finished Mass Effect last night! (non-spoiler review)

I've finished up Mass Effect last night. Overall, very satisfactory RPG, but I must add the caveat that you'll want to be a fan of the military - soldiers of various types out there kickin' tail and takin' names. You don't need to be a hotshot FPS-style player but it does help quite a bit. So, one in the 'military SF RPG' line.

I definitely like the setting. It's a science fiction setting that manages to establish its own identity, rather than leave you feeling 'just like Star Wars' or 'just like Star Trek' (or B5, Firefly, etc.)

I played through the game as an Infiltrator - a combat/tech specialist. Some specific comments:

* While the description of the Infiltrator suggests that you'll be able to hack into things to avoid confrontations, you really won't be doing a lot of this. No Deus Ex 'multiple paths to victory', there's generally only one way through, and mayhem will comprise a large part of that way.
* However, I made great use of the sniper rifle. Note that enemies don't have per-body-part hit boxes, there's no 'bewm headshot' here - hitting any part of the enemy is usually good for a kill. The 'tech mine' skills also came in reasonably handy.
* While you can have up to six NPCs available for your team at a time, you can only take two of them at a time. I'd suggest concentrating on two NPCs that will complement your own skills rather than trying to rotate them all through, so you can focus where your first upgrades are going.
* There are hidden Achievements that you can unlock during gameplay. They'll affect the rest of the game, and further playthroughs. For instance, 150 kills with the sniper rifle means that I can unlock the sniper rifle skill for any further characters I create, whether or not they'd normally have it. You can only pick one bonus skill to give your successor characters.

There's a downloadable content patch expected 'any month now' to add a few more hours of content. The tricky thing is, you can't access it just 'any time', so I'll have to think about whether I want to take my Infiltrator back onto another go-round to try to level him from 50 (the maximum in a normal playthrough) to 60 (max in hardcore), or start a new character with biotics ("Force"-like skills) and the sniper rifle to play that.

Do I really want to play through it again? Hmmm. Not sure. I'm more inclined to try to level a new character from level 1, using biotics and the sniper rifle, if it's sufficiently different, than to run through the same content 'but harder'.

And I can always go back to an older save game for whenever downloadable content hits.

Anyway, it is definitely a fun game, hits the 'big story-based RPG' spot quite well. And yay, it's not yet-another-fantasy RPG!