Infiltrator team - Ashley and Wrex

Soldier team - Garus and Liara


That Garus fella is one mean shot with the sniper, hot damn.

Quite likely. That whole scene was handled brilliantly, actually, from the music, the acting, and the cutaways to the orbital battle with Sovereign. I've talked Wrex down on both the playthroughs I've completed so far, because the first time I was playing a good guy and the second I was using him in my team too often to kill him (barely used him the first time). I was going to see the alternate outcomes on my next goes but I haven't gotten around to playing it again yet.

I might pick it up again, actually. I still have plenty of achievements left to... achieve, the only thing putting me off (which I noticed as soon as I started the second play) is that I feel reluctant to put all the effort into things like scanning and exploring planets over again, but I know the rewards for doing so (monetary and XP-wise) are significant over the course of the game. Especially since I need the Power Gamer achievements, still.

If you're worried about those "play the majority of the game with X" achievements, you can get them without completing the resource gathering quests. I've never completed those quests, because I just don't care. Maybe they pay a lot. I don't know. I'm never too worried about space bucks, since I only ever buy the Spectre level Shotgun and maybe Sniper.

There's only a handful of quests that have you land on generic planets, so they're not too much of a hassle. I space out my side quests between every major planet as a short break from the main story.

Nah, those I don't mind. I assumed that requirement only concerned the main story and sidequests that had a bit of backstory involved. It's just the XP and funds I'd be annoyed at missing out on, because some of the rewards once you've found a decent number are actually pretty high, and the lower level rewards all add up. I might use your strategy and try and do the generic planets inbetween the main story ones, but then I'd probably get neurotic about missing one out

I think it's the mind-numbing tedium of driving the Mako about so often that's my main problem. I might see if I can download a trainer to turbo-charge the damned thing >.>

When I played it through the first time, I was a Paragon Infiltrator that used Ashley and Liara(biotics are one of the few things the computer seems good at utilizing, though Liara liked to die a lot). Since I don't care so much about getting every little cache of goodies in the game the second time around, I'll probably play a Renegade Vanguard with Ashley and the Infiltrator guy. We'll have a lot of soldiering while covering basic tech and biotic stuff. I just hope the AI handles tech abilities as well as it does biotic abilities.

God damn it, even though I'm only lukewarm about this game, you guys are making me want to play it through again just to see different combinations. That gives me two unfinished games now(Witcher and Far Cry 2). Five if you count dragging my *** on levelling my Warhammer Marauder or hitting rank 55 on my new CoD4 profile.

edit: Still have a game I need to finish in both Civ4 and AoE3 and I need to finish Bioshock. *sigh* Too many unfinished games.

Wait, you can kill Wrex? Now I want to play it again, damnit.

This'll spoil it for you if you're looking forward to finding out exactly what ways that part can turn out, but basically 1 of 3 things can happen. 1) You talk Wrex down (either with Charm or Intimidate), 2) You shoot Wrex, having failed to talk him down, or 3) Ashley shoots him before he can do something dangerous to anyone else. The way you handle the aftermath of each can also grant you Paragon or Renegade points.

Hopefully that was sufficiently intriguing to get all the people who haven't played the game yet to start slavering at the prospect

Oh. I maxed out charm pretty early and then got my way for the entire game. :/

My favorite mods for the sniper rifle were the ones that added knockback.

I would also have one of those and a radar-dejamming doohickey.

I liked knocking people down. If it didn't kill them garrus or liara would unleash something unholy.

I noticed that the computer is much more effective with biotics than with rifles. Often times Ashly would just shoot the wall that was directly in-line with the enemy because she couldn't seem to figure a way around it.

Whenever I had that problem I would use biotics or tech to make them come out, or send my squadmates out into the open and punch holes through people with my sniper rifle before they took too much damage.

Liara is like super invincible if you get all the shield powerups.

Right, that's another reason why I stick with Liara and Tali.

Great game indeed. The only thing that was somewhat irritating to me is that wierd 'fuzzy' layer over almost every screen in the game.

You could turn that off, even on Xbox, and I did.

But Tali doesn't have biotics? I guess she has her tech abilities, though.

I often did Garrus + Liara, Garrus + Tali when I want to hack stuff, and Liara + Ashley when I need to kick ***. Liara + Wrex also works great for that.

But yeah, Liara is easily the most kickass for combat. Her biotics are just ridiculously powerful.

Liara and Wrex are the best biotics team.

Depends. If you're playing a soldier, Kaiden is better than Wrex because his biotics are better, he can take care of tech, and a soldier has no need for a tank in the party.

My first play through was a soldier so did use kaiden a lot when I played. Hell, Wrex died on my first play because I didn't distribute my points in charm and intimidate properly because I was being a noob and relied on the auto level feature too much. Oddly enough though, I had Ashley in my party a lot despite the fact her soldier skills and my soldier skills were redundant.

I played adept, so I always had Ashley and Tali, and we were totally uber. Tali is really weak early on in the game (in fact, the game as a whole is pretty difficult early on), but by about level 30 she's totally awesome. Also, does anyone know anything about Mass Effect 2? I've read that you'll be able to play through with your character from Mass Effect 1, but what if I've played through the game several times with this character and I'm both fully renegade and fully paragon and generally fully awesome stats wise. How is that even going to work?