Oh, for refference. I beat it last night. Clocked in just under 29hrs. Quite possibly one of the fastest I've seen. I got the completionist achievement, romance subplot, tons of various smaller achievements, and ended up just shy of level 50....About 10k EXP short of that

Very nice mrstickball. I beat it in about 17 hours on thanksgiving though I skipped a ton of stuff as I was going for being a bad guy so ws trying my best not to help people. I had about 300-400 gamerpoints when I beat it can't recall of the top of my head. I was lv 30 something so obviosly I missed quite a bit.

In terms of shio I will just agree to disagree. I was just pointing how The Witcher compares to mass effect in terms of reviews giving out to point it is more highly acclaimed. Just 1 quick question though, SInce when did an 80 for pc mean a 90 for consoles LOL. Gotta love PC bias since everything they do is so much better then consoles they can get away with crappy scores but compared to consoles they are actaully much much better. Enjoy The witcher as I enjoyed mass effect.

@elnino334 and others who say Mass Effect is better than The Witcher but have not played both

Go try The Witcher, it is the deepest RPG we've seen for quite a while. The Story is brilliant. You can even check the Gametrailers review, they pratically loved the story and the deepness of the game. Infact, from their review you would've thought they would've given a higher score to The Witcher. GT's video review of The Witcher seemed more positive than their ME's review. Guess moneyhats and hype pay.

Well I'll enjoy both. They are different games, mass effect is fantastic. But I think some people over look Witcher. It's very deep and has great graphics. But they are very different RPGs, kinda hard for myself to compare.

To get the completionist and the ally achievements, you need to finish 45 assignments and 10 missions. Which means, if you want the Asari Ally achievement, hold off on doing most of the Citadel sidequests until you make your run to to Prothean Ruins.

Wow man sorry to see your thread so derailed. Great review although I dissagree with a few points.

Presentatin/Quality: I pretty much agree with you here. I only heard one bad voice talent in the game. It was not horrible but the overall excelence of the other actors really made the Human Ambassador stand out as sub-par. I never really noticed a frame rate issue bad enough to bother me but the Texture pop in was a bit irritating.

Id give it a 9.2

Sound: I tend to dissagree with almost everyone here. Sound effects, voice acting, and quality of sound were all top notch but I hated the music. It felt very 70's bad Sci-Fi movie to me. The song in the credits was about the only thing I liked.

a very opinionated 7.5

Gameplay: I played through as a Infiltrator on hard and did mostly paragon choices, the Ashly romance, and only about 4-5 hrs of side quest stuff clocked in at 20 hrs. The only negative aspect of gameplay to me was the Makko. Its the worlds best ATV and can drive over anything on the side missions/exploration but is limited to treches in the main storyline. I just found it unsatifying and ended up getting out to fight in a lot of instances as the combat was more fun. Anyone else run over armatures and colosuses back up shoot with cannon and reapeat?

The cover system, shooting, and tech/biotic abilites made for some Killer gameplay. Not the best enemy ai in the world but its a lot better than it looked in gameplay vids. I found combat to be downright fun when you mix in all the extra abilities. Squad AI was just sad though its a good thing they cant shoot you.

I had a LOT of fun with the combat aspects of gameplay 9.5

Story: Pretty much completly agree with you here. Excellent story. Converstion tree very well implemented and does a good job of immersing you in the storyline. I wish they would have greyed out completed dialog trees though. It is short for a RPG main plotline took me about 15 hrs I think for the main plot. It needed about 2 more missions IMO.

I did not find much of the 4 to 5 hrs I spent on side quest exploration to be very compelling and thats why I droped it and focused on the main plot. Also they did a great job of making the galaxy feel large. Unfourtunatly it also feels lifeless and empty. Even on the citidel NPC's are just window dressing there is no interaction with the envirionment. Most just stand there. None react when you draw your weapon and shoot by or in some cases where it is allowed off station at them. I found that very unsatisfying.

Still excelent story 9.5

Graphics: Its a beautiful game. I loved the art style. Some of the best aliens Ive seen(Wrex) along with some cliched film knockoffs(Alien Queen,cylons) but all well done. That said all the worlds felt barren/lifeless. Its a pretty engine but it needs some vegitation. Texture pop in was distracting and worth noting but frame rate drops were inconsequential IMO.

9

overall 9

If you like story driven gamplay run dont walk to get this game.

OT: The Witcher If you have a PC with XP and you love story drive RPGS you owe it to yourself to play this game. If you have Vista dont bother it wont run without crashing.

Ι really don't understand why shouldn't somebody play BOTH Witcher and Mass Effect. I'm doing this right now. Mass Effect deserves all the great reviews but what deserves most is HIGH SALES so we can play the next part soon enough. Though sales were not that bad...But anyway, great games did not always sell well. Give it a boost Microsoft!!!

@ SpookyXJ : OMG you really didn't you like the music???
Great reviews guys.

I'm 18 hours in and no where near finishing the game, I'm taking my time with it. Honestly I'll say it's the best game I've ever played, hands down. I love it, if I could I'd jump in the tv and live there. I'm not saying it's the most polished perfect game ever, it does have a few weird bugs like slight framerate issues and some weird stuff like textures loading in late, but it really hasn't hurt my experience, and I usually hate framerate issues yet I find they haven't hurt the game, in fact I find more framerate problem come in with running around the citadel then when I'm in the middle of a big gun battle, probably why it hasn't bother me.

 Why I call in the best game ever, is because of the variety of gameplay, first off I'm a huge adventure game nut, I love the classics, also my prior favorite game of all time was Shenmue, and this in the same vein has tons of conversations. Now I honestly was concerned with all the talking in this game, I currently play games mostly late at night(after my wife and kids go to sleep) and I found slow scenes put me to sleep, even good ones, I've conked out in the middle of prerended FF cutscenes, and yet this game has me on the edge of my seat prolonging every conversation, I've even reloaded a save game just to replay a conversation with a different outcome. It's amazing how this game responds to your descisions.

 I'll avoid spoilers but just to make the point there is a scene where your interviewed by a tv reporter, and you can smoothly glide your way through the interview with PC bull, or go to the point of punching this woman in the face who's interviewing you, you'll get reactions from various people based on your choice. You'll also make other choices in the game, big ones and lots of people will talk to you about those choices you've made, it's quite amazing. Plus alot of the choices are interesting social and moral dilemmas, in fact I've often found myself ignoring the whole do I want to come off as a good or bad guy issue and just answering based on my own moral stands, first time I can say that in a game.

Another great thing is how amazing this game  looks in conversation, character models are above and beyond every other game without exception. And this includes some amazing things, like I once paid a main female character a sort of flirty complimenet and she sort of half smiled, it's hard to explain but it was very subtle, and just sort of hit me that your rarely get that level of nuance in facial animation with in-game graphics. 

 the action is fun and your whole team gets skill points whether they played a mission or not which is perfect, so you don't automatically use the same people over and over(for the benefit of one person getting all the skill points) reviewers have complained about how missions lack balance with some abilites having an easy time on some missions and harder times on others. they completely miss the point that they can go back and change their unit to approach the mission differently. Like for example the one guy I have has huge decryption skills but I don't like him for fighting, but decryption gets me access to lots of locked up goodies, so I beat the mission and then go back with him to pick up all the stuff I missed. 

I could go on forever but it's clear it's a very special game, and the fact is it's getting alot of 9's and 9.5s and such, and it's only because people can't in good faith give a game with glitchs a perfect score, but glitchs aside this game by most people would be a 10, in fact read IGN's review they even say something along those lines. Honestly I'm quite ticked off it more people haven't bought it and it's being way outsold by Assassin's Creed which I also like but doesn't deserve to be selling that much better. I just hope it sells enough to warrent it's 2 scheduled sequals. 

Hey, with Euro numbers for Week #2, ME is now upto 400k, and is near-guarenteed 500k after US week 2 numbers are out.