Mass Effect (2021)

To preface, this review is probably going to have more negative points than positive purely because I went into this with very high expectations after years of hearing everyone talk about the franchise, so I went into it expecting to have my mind blown and when I didn't I ended up picking it apart a little more. That said, this was still great, I enjoyed it a lot, and I'm sure a lot of my 'disappointments' (if you can even call them that) will be fixed once I play the rest of the series.

The positives:

• I love that the codex entries were read aloud. At the end of each main quest I'd just click through them and let the voice-over play while I checked notifications, got a drink etc. and it made it much more engaging.
• I love that dialogue was phrased in a way that never made Shepard sound like they lacked obvious in-universe knowledge but still let the players familiarise themselves with new terms. For example, a character might mention X, something the player hasn't come across before, and there'll be a dialogue option to ask about it, but what Shephard will say will be closer to "Isn't X that one thing?" or "Oh yeah, X, what ever happened with that?" so you get a natural explanation while still having it be clear Shepard would have heard of these things before.
• The Mako controls weren't as bad as I've always heard (I assume they were fixed a little with LE)! I didn't really struggle with it and got accustomed to it quickly - sometimes it would do a 180 spin or end up airborne for no particular reason just to keep things interesting, but it was never annoying.

Some criticisms:

• The graphics and sound design are a little janky; I giggled a little at scenes like Jenkins' death because it was so anticlimactic as a result. It was pretty obvious during the scene where Shepard rescues Ashley from the Beacon, too - it was basically just silence and every so often a misstimed impact sound.
• I do kinda wish they'd gone harder on the alien designs. less Asari-type "human women but blue" and more designs like the Hanar or even the Salarians, though I do understand that they would probably want to keep the romance options at least somewhat humannoid. I am glad we got Garrus, at least.
• I wish there was a way to mark quest locations as your destination from the journal rather than having to read the mission description, remember the location name, and go there/mark it yourself.
• Dialogue options aren't always labelled well, which is a general Bioware issue but seemed more prevalent here than with the Dragon Age games. My Shepard was very kind but would often come off harsh because a dialogue option would be written to seem like a nice thing to say and then would turn out to be a blunt accusation or something. Sometimes, there also seemed little difference in options - for example, the dialogue options would be "What did you just say?" and "Explain yourself", and selecting the first would have Shepard say something like "You'd better start explaining", which seems identical to the second option. Later on, multiple dialogue options turned out to lead to the exact same voice-line being played.
• I wanted some more variety in planets. The previews showed some really interesting and pretty worlds in a broad range of colours and environments, but most of the ones you could actually land on and explore were the same barren red deserts.
• The game was a little tell-don't-show sometimes. There were a lot of long stretches of dialogue exposition where a character explains the plot to you while you stand there listening. Sometimes I got the impression some broad revelation with huge implications had just been dropped, but it was delivered so anticlimactically - e.g. what Sovereign was, the pre-Prothean civilisations - that I couldn't really see it as a big deal.
• Speaking of anti-climaxes again, I played a paragon Shepard first playthrough so Saren ended up shooting himself and it was very abrupt with basically no lead-up. It felt like it went from 0-100, "I have no doubts I'm going to kill you all" to "I'm so sorry I was wrong I must die" over the course of a single click.
• Ending on a random still shot of Shepard just superimposed on a picture of space was a weird choice.

This is neither a positive nor a negative, more just a neutral note - I did feel very overpowered by the end. Pretty much every lesser enemy was a one-shot kill with a pistol, Sovereign-controlled Saren was dead within a minute, etc. I don't personally mind this, I play games for the story and have very little interest in combat or difficulty, but it did make some things feel a little rushed and underwhelming.

I didn't feel very emotionally invested in any of the characters, but I do like them all fine, and I assume a) this is compounded by the fact that I didn't engage with any of the first-game romances as none of them clicked with this Shepard, and b) this will change as I progress through the series and get to know them over a longer period.