Mass Effect - Review @ DarkZero

Douglas Adams gets a nod in this review of Mass Effect at DarkZero.  The score is 8/10 and here's the into:

Space... is big, really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is. It is this wide open playing field that is without doubt the main draw of Mass Effect, thus letting you paint your own elaborate story in a much larger and more complex way than Bioware has ever let us do before. So, with sights set on such grandeur it’s hard to admit that Mass Effect is not everything it could have been. In fact, if you look past that big draw a huge amount of limitation has been placed upon what was once thought to be a thriving galaxy. Indeed, the universe that has been created could very well make a lot of people very angry, and even be widely regarded as a bad move. Don’t panic though, Mass Effect is not a bad game, in fact it is far from it. It could even be argued that it is the exact opposite, as after some solid time playing it's clear to see many of the wrongs have been righted that people had with the slightly off-kilter Jade Empire. However, with a collection of bugs, texture pop-in that rears it head every time a cut scene loads, and the repetitious nature of the planets on show it is hard to have complete reverence for what Bioware have accomplished.