Yes I know this game has been out a long time but you’ll have to forgive me for only reviewing it now. I don’t normally play shooting games as I’m not particularly good at them. Give me an actual gun and ask me to shoot  a stationary target and I’m not too bed but shooting games always feels like a totally different ballgame for me.

A good friend of mine eventually bought the xbox game for me, informing me that I would love the storyline if nothing else and would probably survive the shooting on an easier setting.

Well for the most part I did manage to survive the shooting, apart from one very fateful moment when I encountered a thresher maw pictured right when I was in a Mako, below, for the first time and still learning how to control it. I got smooshed very quickly.

Apparently there is also one of these to look forward to when on foot in the later games.

The Mako for me was actually the biggest let down of the game, the controls were just a little too complicated for me, although running over grunts with it was kinda fun. I often spent several minutes, waiting just out of sight and range of enemies for my shields which had almost been entirely exhausted to creep slowly right back up to max so the mako could survive another few minutes of my crazy and very erratic steering while shooting madly in roughly the right direction of the stuff shooting back and hoping I hit and killed something before I had to retreat again and let my shields regenerate once more.

Making my main character Shepard and picking her facial features etc was quite fun. I would have liked to pick clothes a little more but nevermind. She was a great chick and the general person shooting controls were easy enough to use. I also really really like the paragon and renegade feature. When you did good stuff you got paragon points which opened up options for you later where your goodness gave you extra ways out of certain situations plus extra information etc. You can do the oposite with Renegade options. I also liked that choices affected things and I’ll be really interested in seeing how my choices in this game have impacted what happens in the next one.

As my friend pointed out though the storyline and creation of it was awesome. I was very impressed with how many different conversations and comments the characters could make. It really added depth to all the people and made the game very special. I can’t wait to play the next one in the series. I just wonder if I’ll regret letting the first council die in favour of commiting more ships to the defence of the Citadel – it gained me renegade points, which surprised me considering I thought commiting all my war vessels to the defence of the city and population was better than commiting a chunk of my fleet to protecting only a few people. Surely less deaths is better? I guess they went with the very American, protect your leader above all else patriotism. I’m sorry I’m a captain goes down with her ship kinda girl.