Great review. The original has aged very well in my opinion and you got a great deal for it. One of the biggest hurdles for a lot of people I've always heard was the combat. You called it a 3rd person shooter with RPG features but I'd say that applies way more to the sequels which blend the two very well, but I would call the first game an RPG that happens to have gun-based combat.
The cover system was always a bit iffy, and it was often better to not even touch cover and just crouch behind the wall or corner. Not complaining, the combat was never a problem for me, but the real focus was on power use not the shooting--which always left the vanguard and soldier classes a bit dull for me in this game, the infiltrator was fine-- and I know a lot of people didn't like that aspect of the game. The squad AI was decent but had a lot of room to improve, which was thankfully done in later installments. Enemy AI was not the brightest bulb, often just charging out at you in the open, but still oddly challenging since they do make fine use of their own powers and talents, almost annoyingly so on Hardcore and Insane. Probably the game's biggest fault was, despite the multitude of worlds you go to and the rich stories for the quests, the interior environments for almost every non-plotline quest was recycled from a very small pool of cramped caves and prefab colony buildings, there's like literally 3 unique "sets" that you better get used to seeing on the ice planet, the methane planet, the lava planet, the moon, you get the idea. Also, enemy audio, "I will destroy you!" "You must die!" "enemy is everywhere!" "Go! go! go!" is burned into the mind of any real ME fan forever.
I'm surprised you also left out the Mako's insane mountain climbing skills. The feeling of exploring a massive new world was always a blast in those sections, but the mako isn't nearly as fine tuned as a Halo warthog. I'm not sure how the control for that tank came across on pc, but on console it was just off and felt a bit too much like you were controlling the camera and not the vehicle. On harder difficulties also, it got very annoying sometimes to have to stop everything for a good deal of time to repair the vehicle. It became way more efficient to just get out, since it was indestructible as long as you weren't inside of it, use it for cover, and kill the armature with your rifle--and get a niftty xp bonus for doing so, best way to hit lvl 60. Disregarding all of that I just said, I loved the mako and I would have loved to see its return.
Anyway, a great review of one of my favorite games and the first in one of my favorite series of all time. I'm Commander Shepard and this is my favorite review on the Citadel.
oh yeah and a typo in there, Keith David, not David Keith
