Mass Effect?

"So Lab, were you massively affected by Mass Effect?" - It's a good question, especially for you.

I'll just ramble on about things in no particular order, and you make up your own mind if I love/hate the game from there, which sounds like much less work on my part.
Let's start with the texture pop-up; it isn't particularly game-ruining, but there is a lot of it, and due to its sheer quantity it does serve to break the immersion on occasion. In a strange way you get so used to it being bad that you don't notice it after a while, which I guess is one way to fix a bug.

The music is fantastic, almost reaching Halo and Homeworld standards, and then there is the facial animation which is equally awesome... most of the time. Graphically the game is superb (bar the previously mentioned texture issue), and the overall quality and design quickly gloss over concerns about the uneven frame-rate. It I did feel like the developers had cut a lot of corners, to the point where I thought the packaging might actually be approaching round. For instance the item names are very generic, with repeating names and roman numerals denoting power. Then there were the side missions, which suffered from a very cookie-cutter level design. Then there's the lift on the Normandy (which you end up using quite a bit) which shares a sense of expediency with zero-G treacle. There are other elevators in the game that are similarly mellow or long-winded, but at least you get plot related guff to listen to on most occasions.

Combat is a strange mechanic, you have all these abilities and modes, yet I plowed through most of the game without touching any of them. Every now and again one of my party would bust out some bizarre move and the enemy I was shooting at would float around as though they had sat on a helium suppository.

To be honest, I think I could go on for a while listing stuff I liked/hated. The one thing that I was constantly thinking while playing the game was, "FFS, what were the testers/developers thinking/doing?" This happens a lot when I play games these days, but with a small amount of changes Mass Effect could wiped the floor in the GotY competition.

These aren't just empty words on my part. Take the slow loading textures for instance, just have a slightly longer loading screen by default and an option for "Fast loading/slow textures" in the options. *fixed*
A short tutorial on the Force powers... oops, I mean Biotics. *fixed*
Make the AI squad members less willing to sacrifice you when selecting cover *fixed*
A button for the Asari (that's the blue girl for you hard of thinking types) that instantly reduces her level of clothing to bra & knickers *fixed*

Sod it, I will rate it after all, seeing as you asked so nicely: 9.3739287/10