Where's IGN's Mass Effect: Legendary Edition Review?

Late on Monday afternoon, a Mass Effect: Legendary Edition code arrived in my email inbox. As of this writing, that's about 65 hours ago – which would be roughly enough time to hurriedly play through two of its three large-scale RPGs if you did literally nothing else. I decided not to do that, because by now my only opinion on their quality would be that they are not as good as sleeping, eating, or seeing my family once in a while. Put another way, I haven't had enough time with them yet to write anything close to a review. My early impressions based on the first 10 or so hours haven't revealed much about the updated original Mass Effect that you haven't seen or heard previously: it looks much better than it did 14 years ago and the writing and voice performances are still wonderful but the human facial animations (and running) don't compare to modern motion capture tech; combat holds up pretty well even though it's not as smooth as the latter games (switching weapon mods on the fly is still a pain); the Mako is still bouncy but not ridiculously bouncy. I've had a few minor bugs but nothing too disruptive yet. Here's 21 minutes of footage to give you an idea: [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/mass-effect-legendary-edition-the-first-21-minutes-of-gameplay-4k-60fps"] Off the cuff, I can say that revisiting the story after 14 years has been great – I'd forgotten how quickly things get going, the original crew is introduced, and we're off on a hunt for the secrets of the Protheans and the Reapers. But there's still a long journey ahead and it's not meant to be played in one long forced march, so it's going to take a while before I can get my head around all of it for a review. (Whether or not that'll take the form of a full playthrough of all three games and their DLC or some abridged version of that I still don't know, but I'll make sure to be very clear on what I did and didn't play in my final review.) So, wish me luck, and I'll see you on the other side. In the meantime, we've got a ton of Mass Effect content to shoot directly into your veins/eyeballs (your preference), including a rundown of the gameplay changes made in the Legendary Editions, a recap of the entire Mass Effect story so far, and our reviews of every prior BioWare game to date. We're also working on a full performance review video from IGN Graphics Wizard Destin Legarie to do a deep-dive into all the improvements EA has made to the trilogy, so keep an eye out for that! [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=every-ign-bioware-game-review&captions=true"] [poilib element="poll" parameters="id=7a68469c-2ece-424b-be61-0cb42482ba5e"]