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.