You start by defining who Commander Shepard is, choosing gender, background and one of six classes. These range from the Soldier, a gun combat specialist, to the Engineer, who focuses on tech (shields, hacking), to the Adept, who uses powerful biotic abilities (like telekinesis), with the three remaining classes being hybrids of these archetypes.

Once you're done, the game truly begins, and you'll immediately notice how BioWare did everything to make the game as “cinematic” as possible, from the camera angles during conversations to the film grain filter the game uses. Another new feature is the Dialogue Wheel. Developers always struggled to display the long dialogue lines of PC RPGs on a TV screen: the solution used here is to only display short paraphrases of the dialogue lines, so the player quickly reads and chooses, then sees his/her choice spoken verbatim by Shepard.

The game follows BioWare's traditional formula, starting with an intro mission then opening into four locations the player must visit in any order to reach the ending. The difference is that when the game opens you also gain control of your very own spaceship and can fly to various planets and systems to engage in side-quests, which fits perfectly with the game's concept.

As you travel to various planets, you'll eventually meet and recruit companions. Mass Effect 1 has six of them, and they're easily the best BioWare made since Baldur's Gate II. While they wouldn't be fully developed until ME2, the cast is charismatic and memorable.

As the game advances, you'll get the chance to make several choices, which often will award Paragon or Renegade points, a simple morality system inherited from KotOR. Most of them are rather superficial, only changing your mission reward or some extra dialogue line, but they create a decent illusion, thanks to some actually meaningful choices woven in between.