Bioware brings you what looks to be the next transformation of their usual combat/turn based system. But though the action and fighting has changed, the never ending questions and scenarios are all solidly there and do an excellent job of making it seem like you are playing a movie instead of a game.

To make things easier, I'm going to try something different and break these impressions into categories.

The Chat
Stories are told through dialog, and Bioware is famous for doing games where the characters (both user controlled and NPC) speak a ton and have a lot of dialog choices. Typically these Bioware games will do an extreme closeup of the character who is talking, so their face would take up most of the screen, but that isn’t the case with Mass Effect. In Mass Effect you still have dialog options and trees, but it behaves closer to the way you would speak in a normal situation. There are also good and bad choices, so for instance (as they showed us) you can go up to someone and ask them where so-and-so is and then depending on how that goes you can make goodie goodie with them or do the evil thing…pull a freaking gun on them and point it straight at their face.

Speaking of faces (I love my segues) the characters are very nicely detailed, though there is some issue with a few close faces that look a tad wrong in the mouth region. Nothing major, but it was there for some. This may be fixed by release.

Thanks to not being just faces staring blankly into nowhere, Mass Effect looks really nice considering the fact that the camera is generally always moving around and moving in for interesting camera shots that look as if some famous director is directing the game; it really helps draw you into the game. Mass Effect also has some wonderfully done voice work based on what I got to see.

Combat
There is no traditional turn based or even semi turn based RPG gameplay. Instead? Well, do you like first person shooters? Though not told from the first person, the over the shoulder look resembles that of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter's more than anything else. The game plays like an action RPG where you shoot enemies in real time as they appear. Your NPC teammates will do pretty much what they need to do on their own, but you can pause the action and actually manually give your teammates directions to follow…mostly things like flanking the enemies, and this is all done with a person cursor that you simply drag around the environments and place; once you are finished the party members will do just that. Grenades also hone in on their target, which I got a kick out of for some reason, if only because I’m tired of accidentally blowing myself up thanks to my in-game stupidity.

Odds and Ends
You have a screen of the Milky Way that you can go down into and explore various landmarks like other planets and things such as asteroids…just cause you can with your new pimped out ride (I’m sorry, wanted to say pimp). You have this little landrover, which you can use to move about the environment and explore for crews or items or whatever is programmed into it. Also of interest was the fact that you will not visit Earth…at least in this installment.

The game will be coming out this winter season and it will take you anywhere from 25-30 hours depending on how many planets and such you visit and depending on how thorough you decide to be in your searches during the game.

Msss Effect will feature three party members on screen at a time, but there will be a pool of 8-10 final computer NPC fans you can look to find and add to your butt kicking repertoire.

Finally, it was promised that, though it is a trilogy, there will be no cheap cliffhanger endings and every game will have a satisfactory ending should you ever choose not to go through with the entire trilogy as it is released (they only said they will have the trilogy done by the end of the Xbox 360 lifepsan). Also, downloadable content over the Marketplace could be prologue stories that play between the downtime of one game and the next.