Mass Effect

What a great sci-fi RPG experience. It's biggest quality is, of course, its worldbuilding, the universe it creates with its many characters and plotlines is so believable and polished, it's easy to sink in plenty of hours uncovering its secrets. Outside of the big spectrum of the game's world, the main plot plays it safe and is kinda predictable, but it gets the job done, and can be amazing under the right circumstances, with the many choices and great dialog, even if it's largely inconsistent, having a lot of corny and badly written moments, the last shot of the protagonist made me laugh out loud for how cheesy it was.

The character interaction is hit or miss, some characters are very interesting and fun to tag along with and explore, and some others are really underdeveloped and annoying; it took me close to 4 hours to realize Kaidan was a full-on squadmate instead of a generic companion like the ones in Skyrim. And there's the gameplay, which has a very interesting strategic approach, it controls like a third person shooter but feels like a turn based RPG, with the many abilities to use, the attack cooldown, the commands to the squad, it feels a tad bit more cerebral and rewarding than the usual TPS, even if it is a little clunky and repetitive at times.

With that said, the "exploration" sections with the Mako vehicle are underwhelming to say the least, the controls aren't very satisfying, and the areas to "explore" are just poorly textured terrain that seem randomly brought up with the engine's brush tool with the same 3 enemies repeated over and over, and unfortunetely these sections take up a huge chunk of the game. Ultimately, it's a brilliantly ambitious and fascinating game, which just needed a bit more polish in order to be more fun and memorable.

Pros/Cons:

PROS:
-Masterful worldbuilding
-Fun and complex gameplay
-Memorable moments and choices
-Plenty of likable characters

CONS:
-Tedious vehicle sections
-Lack of full-on exploration
-Uneven writing
-Some less than stellar characters