We’ve all had our share of gaming pie this year, with some pretty filling content being worked through our systems. BioShock? Mario Galaxy? Call of Duty 4? That’s some tasty pie right there, chums. In fact, it’s been a pretty decent year for gaming all things taken into consideration, with a load of new consoles for us to get to know and – try to – love, and a whole load of choice on the menu in terms of software. Latest to slide in front of us on a lovely disc-shaped platter is Mass Effect, cooked by the same chefs who made us the original Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire.

Mass Effect is no mere pie, though. No – Mass Effect is more of a pie within a pie, served with a side ordering of yet more pie on a bed of pie. In terms of density, detail and painstaking care creating a believable science-fiction world, BioWare have rather outdone themselves. Sprawled out across not just a number of planets a selection of large galaxies, the game plays out rather like an intergalactic game of hide-and-seek, with the main character and their merry band of followers hopping from planet to planet in pursuit of a menacing bad guy.

You’ll notice the rather unspecific tone in which I talk of the game’s lead character, Commander Shepard. This isn’t just the result of me being incredibly lazy (although it is rather early in the morning) – it’s more the fact that the game allows you to shape Shepard pretty much any way you wish. Man or woman, hunk or petite, forming your character is something that actually becomes quite impulsive, and if you’re anything like me you’ll spend at least fifteen minutes making sure your hero has exactly the right shade of hair, shape of nose of protrusion of chin.

Once done, you’re given a few selections as to your background and thrown right into the mixture. Previous BioWare devotees will pretty much know what to expect from Mass Effect; you travel around discovering new worlds and fighting enemies, talking to characters, exploring branching conversations and solving or creating a whole host of rights and wrongs whilst following a central storyline. What this game does, as opposed to many similar RPG’s, is to blend first-person shooting into the equation, giving the player a rather different experience. Does it work?

Yes and no, to be honest. Perhaps the answer lies closer to the former than the latter, but Mass Effect isn’t quite the magnum opus it seemed it was destined to be. The reasons for this are many and mostly minor, but it’s only fair that we lodge them nicely alongside all the stuff that the game does right, for there’s plenty. If there’s one thing that BioWare can’t be accused of, it’s providing the players with an under-realised environment to surround themselves in throughout their time voyaging through the galaxies.

Played in the third-person with an over-the-shoulder camera for gunplay, initial stages will see you setting foot on one of the first planets colonised by humans outside Earth. A short bit of scrapping later and a rather menacing Spectre – think super freelance space vigilante – goes renegade and it’s left to you and an ever-increasing bunch of cohorts to track him down and bring him to justice. It’s the start of a rather epic storyline that sees you zipping around numerous locations in various galaxies, fighting enemies and generally saving the day.

Not that it’s that simple, of course – games of this type (specifically BioWare efforts) are multi-faceted beasts, with all sorts of good-or-bad, black-or-white conundrums to puzzle over. Whether it’s being the gun-slinging hero or the tyrannical monster that floats your boat, there’s so much choice available when picking through the plot and side offerings in Mass Effect that you are spoilt for choice. Allow a fan of yours to take a picture, or tell him to shove his camera? Shoot the illegal trader, or negotiate? Kill an entire infected colony, or attempt to save them? On whatever scale you find your problems there’s always an option, and there’s often a consequence.

That being said, there’s very little in the terms of middle-ground. Whilst there being set good and evil sides is applicable to George Bush’s vision of the world, there’s many a time when you’ll find in Mass Effect that doing certain things have curious effects. The game sees fit to categorise actions and comments into two categories, Renegade (think the Empire, Manchester United, Shredder from Turtles etc) and Paragon (conversely, Jedi, Liverpool and everyone’s favourite rat Splinter), and there are often situations where what you thought was a pretty down-the-line resolution will get you points for either side. It’s obviously good to have the choice of what attitude you take through the game, but a few shades of grey would have gone down nicely amongst the black and white.

What does sit in the middle ground – between good and bad, that is – is the game’s combat. Throughout the duration of the game you’ll be battling through numerous enemies with various weapons of differing types, each of which you can specialise in by assigning talent points to when you level up. Whether it be with pistols, rifles, shotguns or sniper rifles, combat scenarios see the camera zoom to sit just behind your character’s shoulder, with an aiming reticule appearing to help you spray bullets a little more effectively.

This, however, is the mere tip of the iceberg. With you during your battles are two computer controlled chums who you may select at the start of each mission. Via a handy tap of the RB or LB buttons you can get all three to change weapon types or, should you fancy a bit of magic trickery, use their accumulated biotic abilities to throw enemies, increase the power shields around you, form a handy little barrier in front of you and a whole host of other balance-swinging tactics. It’s good on paper, true, and once you get the swing of it then you’re going to be more effective at using the whole kit and caboodle, but it’s not without its issues.

The first of these becomes apparent the very moment you wander across your first encounter and are given precisely zero pointers as to what exactly you have to do. Sure, it’s not exactly rocket science in early goings-on, but a few tips here and there wouldn’t have gone amiss. Likewise, the use of the biotic and weapon wheel for you and your teammates is something you happen upon rather than being informed of, and is something that really could have done with at least some basic form of introduction.

This, however, is something you can overcome. What you can never surmount, though, is the sheer ineptitude of your AI ‘chums’. Whether it be gormlessly wandering into your line-of-fire, standing around whilst an enemy continually shoots them from POINT-BLOODY-BLANK-SODDING-RANGE or failing to understand or carry out the basic commands available to you via the d-pad, you’ll find yourself having to often make up for their presence rather than take advantage of it. It gets rather frustrating to say the least, and quite often you’ll find yourself having to fight packs of enemies on your own after your mates get downed in a few seconds due to meandering stupidly into the middle of the melee.

Obviously, the more proficient you make Shepard the easier the issue gets to work around. Completing story missions, doing side quests and defeating individual enemies earns you experience points towards levelling up, upon doing which you are given a couple of talent points to file in various attribute bars. In doing so you can specialise your characters towards close-quarters shotgun combat, sneaky sniping or middle-of-the-road rifle work, whilst also giving them various biotic powers dependent on their race and speciality.

This builds on the commendable sense of individuality that Mass Effect produces. Making yourself into a deadly sniper really does give a different feel to proceedings than being a tough-as-nuts shotgun expert, and if anything encourages you to mix things up a bit.

Much has been made of Mass Effect’s size and scope, but in reality it’s not quite as vast as perhaps you may have hoped. Whilst it is true that the game features over a dozen different galaxies for you to visit, each galaxy only has one planet on which you can land and explore. The rest are either given a text explanation or will see your ship send a recon squad out to search, the results of which are told to you via a little menu that pops up.

The planets aren’t exactly huge either, with exploration being concentrated into a squared area bounded on the map by a red border. You’re launched down onto your chosen planet in a rather futuristic moon buggy named the Mako that handles like a barn door and has controls to match, and can traverse the various dips and crests in that, or get out and have a bit of a wander if you see something you fancy taking a look at. In reality, each planet tends to have a few items scattered around that act as collection tasks throughout, others containing new equipment and perhaps one or two locations in which a sidequest can be undertaken, each of which seems to be rather disappointingly be based upon one of two templates with a few different items scattered around.

Talking of the sidequests, these are numerous but on the whole rather similar in nature. Usually these involve going to person A, finding his grievances with person B and sorting them out or heading to a planet, fighting your way through an enemy nest and gaining an item or information. Whilst this was more-or-less the case in Knights of the Old Republic, you would have hoped that perhaps a little variety would have been added to the mix in order to spice things up.

Another potentially exciting point about Mass Effect was the storyline and the way in which you can interact with other characters, and to be fair BioWare have hit the nail pretty much on the head when it comes to the reams of dialogue packed into the game. Conversations can take a number of routes dependent on whichever mood you feel like, with selections ranging from polite and helpful to rather salty. Obviously, taking different attitudes in different situations will result in your Paragon/Renegade meter swinging accordingly, so you’ll have to give some consideration to various questions and responses.

The best bit, though, is that the options you pick from on-screen only give a general idea of what your character is going to say, leaving the rest a surprise. Whilst the helpful and unhelpful responses are generally places on the top and bottom of the option wheel respectively, there’s plenty of variety in the ways you can speak with people, and throughout the game you are also given the option of increasing your charm and intimidation skills to open up further options.

This does a lot more that merely give conversations a different route to travel down, however. In certain quests, being able to scare the pants off a character or to be able to give them the silver tongue will help resolve a situation that would have otherwise ended up in a brawl. One such example occurs on a space station that has been hijacked, with the crew and captain being held at gunpoint by biotic fanatics. On one hand you are able, should you wish, to wade in all guns blazing, wipe everyone out and leave the situation with a rather unfortunate series of corpses rotting up the hallways. On the other, a bit of persuasive talking either way could, if you are at a high enough level, see the situation arrive at a slightly more amicable end. As with a lot of Mass Effect, the choice is yours.

With these choices come consequences, and the way in which characters interact with you depending on your reputation and deeds is also very enjoyable. Early on in the game you are accosted by a journalist following a certain quest, and she will ask a series of questions depending on what actions you carried out during the mission. Your reactions to these questions will then be reported in a news bulletin whilst in one of the Citadel’s many lifts, allowing you to either bask in media adulation or cringe at a rather stinging report. The scope for what you can do in terms of moulding your own aura is huge.

Alas, with this scope also come moments where the game falls through the safety net. Bugs are spread far and wide in Mass Effect and to various degrees of annoyance, from getting stuck in bits of scenery to side quests being able to be completed in the wrong order, leading to slightly broken bits of narrative. Technically the game also seems to struggle to keep up with itself at times, with rather bad slowdown occurring during hectic battles and textures sometimes appearing rather belatedly on surfaces, giving a few seconds of rather strange scenery.

Apart from said moments, Mass Effect looks rather lovely. Alien races are all pleasingly unique and have particular appearance quirks and all characters’ facial details are wonderfully expressive, whilst the worlds that you visit are full of dusty reds, lush greens and icy whites. Even the Citadel itself looks majestic in all its hulking great way, with narrow corridors housing a casino, an amusing lap-dancing club and a beautiful central lake. For all the glitches and delayed textures, you can’t help but feel pleased with how the game looks. The same is very much true for the audio side of things as well, although there are much fewer – if any – negatives to be drawn from it. Featuring more menacing synths than Johnny Greenwood would know what to do with, it provides an apt backdrop for the rather moody, epic nature of the story.

One thing you’d possibly be expecting from the game, given its heritage, is that it’ll last you a good while. Now, to some extent this is true; completing side quests, exploring conversation options and picking up collectables and new weaponry adds a great deal of length of proceedings. Even taking that into account, the final total of about twenty hours to work your way through a pretty comprehensive playthrough is a little disappointing, with the ending coming well before you expect it. Thankfully the nature of Mass Effect encourages repeat plays, but even withstanding this you can’t help but feel that a little more plot longevity would have gone a long way.

Another main thing Mass Effect doesn’t quite do right is the difficulty level, which at the start is made artificially tricky by leaving you to work things out for yourself but then, following a brief peak, seems to tail off as you progress and level up your characters, and despite the game offering a selection of difficulty levels, the curve remains pretty much the same on all of them. Even on latter levels I was able to pretty much blat through countless enemies with a weapon that I only later discovered wasn’t even the strongest I had on offer

The main reason for that was the game liberally chucks vast amounts of weaponry, armour and items your way, leaving you with an enormous amount to sift through. At no point does finding a new and better weapon ever really feel that much of an achievement, and in any case you are often flushed with so much cash and repeat items to sell that you can pretty much afford anything you haven’t found out in the field anyway. By giving you so much BioWare were obviously trying to add to the options on offer, but pretty quickly you’ll just end up looking at the weapon stats, selecting the best and selling the riff-raff.

Still, you have to pat the development bods on the back really, as what works is fantastic, and what doesn’t is merely them trying to stretch things a little too far. The fact that Mass Effect is so vast and so unique to everyone who plays it makes it about as easy to relate to people as eating jelly with one chopstick, but for all the rights, wrongs and I’m-not-convinced-either-way moments the game has, you can’t help but think upon it positively. It sets out a template for BioWare to work on and sand the rough edges off, and in the meantime gives players what is really a very enjoyable adventure to run through and repeat in a number of different ways. It’s buggy, it’s often frustrating and it’s not quite as open as you may have hoped, but what Mass Effect certainly can also be is a marvellous attempt to provide players with their ultimate sandbox adventure. Onwards and upwards, chaps.