Right at the outset you make a couple of conversation choices, but really what they want to do is hustle you into some action before they lose the xbox shooter crowd. It's not the most sophisticated shooting game I've ever experienced, but then again, I'm a PC shooter, myself. I should probably have just played this game on the PC, for heaven's sake. I can hardly hit anything. I begin to miss Jade Empire, which was focused on martial arts and other sorceries that are easy for a console character to excel at. Why does everyone love all this cover-based shooting with two analog sticks? It's neither realistic nor intuitive. Ah well, I'm not concerned. After all, I'm about to grind the hell out of this game, and I'll be so overpowered I'll ruin people before they even see me coming. Unfortunately, it means a little dying at the beginning as I struggle through early levels.
You land on a human colony named Eden Prime to escort a newly-discovered Prothean beacon back to Alliance space. Remember, all our current technology is based on the ruins of old Prothean stuff - finding an intact and working piece of their technology could launch us into new realms of advancement. So it's pretty important. The Council has sent along a Spectre to oversee both the mission and to check you out as a prospect, he's a turian named Nihil. Naturally, before you even finish the mission briefing, something's gone catastrophically wrong - the colony on Eden Prime is under attack by an unknown alien force. Time to get to work. I'm dropped into a hotzone with my buddies Lt. Alenko and Lt. Jenkins and almost immediately, Jenkins bites the big one. He runs out of cover and is gunned down by some kind of android flying bot. Sorry, Jenkins. We barely knew ye.
I fumble around with my guns for... probably longer than is respectful. There isn't much in the way of tutorials - just point and pull the trigger when the reticule is orange, I guess. Too much shooting and my gun overheats. Right bumper button pauses while I mull over weapon choices for the squad, and left bumper pauses while I look at our activate-able powers. That's all I can figure out, but that's probably all there is to it. Luckily, the enemies are pretty much pushovers at this stage, and we soon run into a marine who's on the run from more droids. Ashley Williams, last survivor of her squad stationed on Eden Prime. Welcome to the team, Ashley, now gun down those other drones. The AI drones are impaling still-living humans on high-tech spikes; unnecessarily gruesome! It turns regular humans into weird drones called 'husks' that run at me and explode into a bunch of sparks. Meanwhile, Nihil is off scouting ahead when he runs into another turian he recognizes. Of course, as soon as Nihil's back is turned, this turian (Saren) pulls out his gun and shoots him in the back. I come across his dead body and wring the full story out of a scared witness who was hiding behind some crates. Two people dead on my squad, and an entire colony, about to be blown to smithereens - this candidate review for the Spectres is not going to look good, I'm afraid.
I defuse the bombs that Saran left to blown up the entire colony and finally reach the beacon object I've been looking for all this time - wonder where Saran went, I thought he was just here with it a second ago. Alenko wanders too close to the beacon and it starts go to berserk. I shove him out of the way and get sucked up in some kind of weird knowledge-transmission / vision or whatever you want to call it before the entire beacon self-destructs. Ashley and Kaiden carry my unconscious self back to the ship.
