I tried to make this a 100 word review in three parts. I failed.

I parted with eight of my hard-earned English pounds for this.  Any more and I would have felt severely cheated. It's the same old Bioware paradigm with different art assets. KOTOR in space, but not Star Wars space, some different non-descript Halo, Starship Troopers, Babylon 5 knock-off space. The lightsabers were the best bit of KOTOR and there aren't any in Mass Effect, that should give you some indication of where this review is going. What has it added since 2003?  Nothing.  It feels like exactly the same game. What arsehole gave Bioware the rights to KOTORMMO?  No-one that has played any of their games it seems.

I don't know why I allowed myself to hold any hope for this. Utterly irrelevent quests, delivered in severely outdated fashion.  One particularly grating encounter had me encouraging a mother to seek gene therapy to prevent the child inheriting some disease that killed its father. Is this the developer trying to be topical?  This is by no means the only example.

Quest design in this game is:

• Talk
• Get quest
• Kill something or press something or kill something and press something
• Repeat three times

Is three repeats some kind of game making magic?  Some law like the rule of thirds? There was huge potential for changing things up here, perhaps adding a dash of ambiguity to the proceedings, making you accountable for your actions. It's not hard:

1. I just hacked a computer. 
2. "Hey, I saw you hack that computer, what do you think you're doing?"  
3. Fight or lie or something fucking way more interesting than anything that actually happens.

But no, here's the beef;  Chase a bad alien dude who's trying to destroy the galaxy and save said galaxy. It doesn't get anymore complex than that. Oh it's a race against time too.  We have to stop him before he gets to said place. It's probably fine if I travel to utterly unrelated systems and spend months wondering around surveying planets and killing irrelevant shit though.

This is all wrapped up in the illusion of choice.  None of your actions seems to have lasting consequence. After killing a bunch of mercs in a space station, no-one bats an eyelid.  Nothing changes regardless of what conversation path I choose.  I still need to go to planet A and perform task B. The result is the same, but maybe the topping is slightly different.

Chrono Trigger had better cause and effect in 1995.  Steal items from the fair, you get arrested and tried. In Mass Effect I steal and I kill with reckless abandon and  no-one seems to care.  Maybe this is my fabled Spectre untouchable all-poweredness. Or something.

Combat is clunky, clumsy and unengaging. Your comrades are idiots and frequently die despite being two steps away from cover. Often there is almost no indication you are being hit and then suddenly you're dead, usually a fraction of a second after the "almost dead" warning. This often results in having to replay the last 45 minutes. Why are there no check points?  I've just completed 80% of the current quest and now you ass-fuck me by jamming me in a corner with your terrible environment design and melee me to death without me being able to heal or fight or escape.

The whole game is like they got a list of "cool stuff" from a focus group and put it all in without any thought of design.  It's an horrific checklist of cliches and generic features.

My list of hate for this game is very long, so I'll just cover a few highlights:

• Why, if there is some huge attack on a planet, are the battles only ever three or four bad guys at a time?
• Why are there huge and irrelevant driving sections? Where the driving is poor.
• Why do some doors open automatically and some need a key press?
• Why if I'm a master of electronics or decryption, do I have to ATB everything I touch?
• Why are my ancient flashbacks recorded footage of meat with circuit boards in them?
• Why are there no even moderately interesting quest concepts?
• Why can enemy biotics knock me down and kill me without me being able to defend myself?  This is fucking basic people.  You never make the player feel like he's powerless.  It's cheating.
• Why are the cutscenes so badly implemented (the escape from the mine is just one example)?

Mythbusters proved you can polish a turd.  This is it right here.

I hate this game.