The team at BioWare knows how to suck players into a story: They give you just enough freedom to personalize your protagonist, and then they spend the whole game telling you who you really are, what you're doing—and most tantalizing of all, what'll happen to you next. When Mass Effect gets going, it's impossible to put down. Yet the payoff falls short, and not just because of the gameplay. (Though whole sections of the game do look like they came from the interns: the color-matching hacking puzzle, the half-hearted shooter action, all those mysterious, mysterious planets that turn out to be two valleys and a pile of junk, and the stupid ground vehicle that's as lethal as a Ford Taurus with a shotgun taped to the hood.)
Role-playing-game addicts could easily ignore gameplay problems if the story kept delivering. Yet Mass Effect feels like the first two acts of a great space opera, and the main villain and the most intriguing parts of the backstory have been saved for a sequel. The non-player characters that hang around with you have also taken a major step back, with less dialogue and none of the spontaneous clashes (and subtle flirting) of BioWare's past high-water marks, Baldur's Gate II and Knights Of The Old Republic. The graphics keep improving, but the diehards would rather be immersed in the words.