Originally posted by: CurseTheSky
Looks like Mass Effect is a must-play, huh?
What's the game play like? Shooter with skill-ups? Will I end up walking around talking to people for half the game (kind of like Oblivion / Fallout 3), completing quests, etc. or is it more linear like the Half-Life games?
It's a mixture between story-driven linearity (unavoidable events, characters interactions, locations, scripted sequences) and free exploration. You can somewhat compare it to Morrowind/Oblivion/Fallout 3 in that at the beginning (without giving any spoilers) you'll have to follow a given, linear path, similarly to the introduction of Morrowind on the boat, or Oblivion in the prison, or Fallout 3 during the Vault 101 sequences, before going outside "for good" and freely. But during your exploration you will get quests, receive messages, most of the quests are non-obligatory, side quests, but are certainly highly recommended to complete to gain new items mostly. You'll be able to freely choose which planets and planetary systems you'll want to travel to and explore, not all of them can be explored on its surface however (some of them can be scanned from orbit, some of them give you the possibility to land on it with a special wheeled and armored vehicle).
Another form of freedom of choice is that you can choose which of the members of your team (which you'll build up during the course of the game's events) you want to bring with you on missions, with light to heavy consequences on how the missions will play, since each of your members are specialized at doing specific tasks more efficiently than other teammates. I won't reveal anything, but there's also the possibility that dialog and mission results will be slightly or largely different depending on which team members you brought with you. Mostly Mass Effect can be considered a "medium"-paced action-RPG, it's not too fast, but not too slow either, it's very well balanced between dialog, exploration and scripted story-driven sequences, and to be honest with you the voice acting of so good that you'll actually play mostly to get to that next scripted scene, it's going to bother you eventually to not know what has to happen next, so you might be very tempted to go to the next part of the "main quest", it's literally like a movie, and you might as well get attached to most if not all of your teammates, they all have their own past, their own personalities, superb voice acting as mentioned earlier (but it's worth mentioning again).
Additionally, before you start a game, you can create a new character, either male or female, from the character editor, although it's not as complex as Oblivion's, it still gives plenty of possibilities for facial appearances and such. In my humble opinion Mass Effect is the very best of all the BioWare games released to this day (yes, even better than Knights of the Old Republic and Baldur's Gate II, but that's just me), and I can only hope that Mass Effect 2 will be just as good, it doesn't even need to be better, but if it gets better, then I won't know what to say other than Jesus Christ that thing is good.
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