Playing Mass Effect is like driving a Lamborghini, but with your mother's Buick V6 installed under the hood. It's a jaw-droppingly gorgeous game, a huge leap in presentation on the outside. On the inside, it's just another BioWare title--thoroughly enjoyable, always dependable, but somewhat flawed.

And that's okay. Though the game's unprecedented direction often highlights its own shortcomings, it's still a great RPG for Xbox 360 owners to devour. You'll just have to deal with those flaws--most of them minor, some of them major--without smashing your controller to pieces in the process. You'll want that controller fully intact, because you'll be back for more planetary excursions an hour later.

The story of Mass Effect revolves around the character of John (or Jane, or Alfonso) Shepard. He (or she) is a member of the Alliance military, and the traditional last hope for the galaxy, herding the human race and its alien allies past the dangers of internal corruption and external extinction. It's a sweeping epic told on a personal scale, with a few key players providing most of the conflict, and a huge number of minor characters filling in the rest.

In many ways this is familiar ground for BioWare. Shepard soon becomes a Spectre, a sort of interstellar sheriff, who only reports to a council of wise elders. Tasked with nullifying an imminent threat to galactic civilization, you'll be jetting around the galaxy from moon to planetoid, all via an enormously detailed galactic star-map--a device which seems a given in every sci-fi game these days, from Mario to StarCraft II.

Shepard's spacious starship hails from The Citadel, a Coruscant-esque space station, a place where do-gooders and scum and villainy alike can sit down to share a drink. Themes of racial strife and mind-controlling zealotry quickly surface. Much of this is reminiscent of BioWare's classic Knights of the Old Republic, which certainly isn't a bad thing.

But right from the opening scenes, Mass Effect quickly distinguishes itself as a wholly new experience. Simply put, a video game has never been this cinematically engaging. Just gazing at a simple grain-filtered shot of a planet--complete with lens-flared sunlight, Star Warsian framing, and a disparate synth-heavy sci-fi score by Richard Jacques--can be an exciting moment. Even the most insignificant environment or character is rendered and shot in a compelling light--or shadow, as the case may be. Rarely does the polish fade. From back to front, Mass Effect is one of the first games to truly approach an actual cinematic quality.

The primary achievement comes with the conversations that take place on Shepard's travels. Beyond the major characters that populate the star-scape, there are a large number of secondary players; NPCs with problems to solve and stories to tell, ready and waiting to be unlocked through expansive dialogue trees. After initiating a conversation, a small, unobtrusive radial menu drives the sequence. The phrase choices presented to the player are usually brief--"No way" or "Tell me more"--but they translate into long sentences of exposition, allowing players to simply express their gut feeling and see it realized on screen, without having to read sentences of extraneous options. And because these choices can be selected before an NPC has finished talking, you can queue up Shepard's response, maintaining a flow of dialogue that feels more natural than any game has managed to this point.

Matching the dialogue systems in innovation is the brilliant cinematography. BioWare employs a healthy amount of dramatic angles and depth of field to its camera, making for some very visually interesting chats. Combined with impressively accurate lip-syncing, convincing facial expressions, and consistent voice work, talking to computer people has never felt this slick. As you walk down the fascinating hallways of the spaceship Normandy, chatting with random crew members, you are immediately immersed.

The main storyline is perfectly coherent, if a little dry at times. While the writing isn't always up to par--some lines spoken during key moments fall laughably flat--there are usually enough options to get around the straightforward nature of the plot. In other words, acting like a jerk is usually more fun than playing the honorable soldier--a phenomenon that seasoned RPG fans will immediately be familiar with. There may not be much humor in the writing itself, but after maximizing Shepard's dialogue skills, you'll be having fun twisting your character's attitude one way or the other, to the benefit--or downfall--of his brief acquaintances.

Mass Effect's visuals push hard on the current boundary of graphical realism--frequently pushing so hard that they break in the process. Texture pop-in mars the scenery at random. Eyelids clip through cheekbones. Teeth become strangely blackened, as if the character ate a bag of Oreos in between lines. I managed to look past these glitches on the whole, but it's a real shame they exist, because they're bound to pull people out the game at one point or another.

Outside of the bugs, player models generally excel not only in design, but also in pure polish. The alien Taurians are particularly notable, a sort of reptilian species that looks fantastic on screen. Many of the worlds and planets you'll run across are equally impressive, featuring a satisfying variety of war-torn cityscapes and dank alien ports. It really does look as good as the screenshots suggest, and even better in motion.

However, it's not all about playing tea-time with pretty Mr. Spaceman. Sometimes Shepard has to drop the veil of interstellar diplomacy, grab a rifle, and go to town. And though Mass Effect's conversation system is unequaled, its combat mechanics fail to meet the same standard.

Adopting a third person combat system in the vein of Gears of War seemed a logical place for BioWare to go at the outset. The cover system and radial menus work well enough in avoiding the slow, turn-based repetitiveness of typical RPG battles. In the end, it's a combination of poorly designed encounters, simplistic AI, and dull vehicular sections that make for an uneven, often frustrating element to this otherwise-groundbreaking game.

While an action game like Gears of War is designed as a smooth, coherent combat experience, Mass Effect's battles vary from pointlessly simple to impossibly challenging, with hardly any warning prior to the latter. They play out like an action game, but have a decided RPG stiffness to them. Most enemies will require little effort to mow down--sniping stupid, unknowing soldiers through cracks in walls or stairways is a cheap, if silly way to get the job done. However, some will charge you at random, slaughtering your teammates in seconds and leaving you to fend for yourself. Other foes will suddenly knock you to the ground with an ability, rendering you defenseless for a critical number of seconds, unable to move as you are picked off by snipers or other devices. It's hard to describe how infuriating this can be.

It's not that the combat is overly difficult in a tactical sense--in fact, most battles require little forethought. It is the unbalanced, random nature to the fights that ultimately disappoints. The rate at which you can be killed is stunning. One particularly flawed boss encounter will likely have most players reloading the game dozens of times before achieving a bitter victory. Smaller surprises found in other missions can require the same amount of trial and error. Reducing the difficulty only lowers the amount that enemies scale with your character's level, which does not always alleviate the problem of enemy behavior and level design.

None of this would be quite as painful if the combat itself was fantastically entertaining, but no one aspect stands out. Spells are limited to a standard issue of immobilizing abilities, force powers, and other blasts. They're fun at first, but nothing to get worked up over. Popping off a few rifle rounds from behind cover is enjoyable enough, but the overall experience is no more exciting than any average shooter. Players should expect to be breezing through the vast majority of missions. The rest of the time, after you've been utterly crushed for the 20th time in a row, you'll be wishing you could just sit down with your enemies and calmly convince them to surrender.

Read more for thoughts on items, characters, vehicular combat--and why Mass Effect is undeniably worth playing despite its flaws.