I guess the fact that I finally played Mass Effect means I've given up my quixotic struggle against DRM software. I'll write about that later, but I'd heard a lot of good things about the game and my curiosity finally got the best of me.
I feel conflicted about reviewing it and I'm not sure where to start. On the one hand, it's one of the slickest, smartest, best-written role-playing games I've seen. On the other, the gameplay is mediocre and needlessly padded, and in fact about a quarter of the way in I turned the difficulty down to the minimum so I could sleepwalk through the combat sequences and get to the next part of the story.
The setup is familiar to anybody who's read or seen much science-fiction: It's two hundred years in the future, and humanity is a relative newcomer to the galactic community. The Alliance, a coalition of human countries and colonies, is sort of a junior member of an interstellar federation called the Citadel Council, which has governed a large portion of the galaxy for millennia. You play Shepard, an elite human soldier, who becomes the first human candidate for the Spectres, the Council's covert law enforcement agency. Your first assignment, an investigation into the theft of an archaeological relic, leads first to the discovery of corruption within the Council, and then, of course, to a terrible secret which threatens all species.
Batting 127 ain't too shabby. 