The Mass Effect story as crafted by author and lead writer for the series Drew Karpyshyn is a simple tale of man versus machine set in the depth of field we have come to expect from Sci-fi universes. Front and centre we have the battles and tribulations of individuals such as Saren, Anderson, and Shepherd which are all set against the greater struggle for the humanity’s emergence as a galactic power and the growing threat of a bloody invasion by a mysterious a race ominously called the Reapers.

Mass Effect: Revelation was the first instalment chronologically in the Mass Effect series. The novel by Drew Karpyshyn is based on David Anderson’s exploits as an undercover Alliance officer and his later attempts to impress the Galactic council enough to be allowed to serve as humanity’s first Spectre agent. Anderson is sent on an infiltration mission with a Spectre agent called Saren that goes horribly wrong and ends in the deaths of hundreds of innocents but not before Saren learns a deadly secret from over the dead bodies of the people he was supposed to apprehend for interrogation. Anderson carries the can for the incident and humanity is no longer allowed to play with the big boys.

The action role playing game videogame by Bioware Mass Effect followed. In the guise of either a male or female main character called Shepherd you begin the game as an Executive Officer to the Captain Anderson aboard a prototype human spaceship called the SSV Normandy. First serving at the behest of the human military you then become a gun slinging Spectre agent of the unified galactic council of races. Your first and most important mission: Saren, the Spectre agent we met in Revelation has gone rogue and has allied himself with a cybernetic race called the Geth who are mounting a bloody insurrection; you are to stop Saren and the Geth.

As the game progresses we find out that Saren has become a mindless lackey of a mechanical life form known as a Reaper (the location of which was the secret he learned at the end of Mass Effect: Revelation) and has been organising the Geth armies to facilitate the Reaper’s return to slice and dice all organic life in the Galaxy. Along the way you have to handle the activities of mercenaries, terrorist groups, criminal gangs, slavers and smugglers, and a disavowed and now off the grid Alliance military black operations group called Cerberus who is hell bent on pushing humanities cause forward to the detriment of all. 

The first Mass Effect downloadable content released by Bioware between the games was called ‘bring down the sky’ and gave visual form to the Batarian race. Although mentioned in the novel Mass Effect: Ascension, no Batarians actually appeared in Mass Effect proper.

When humanity first emerged on the galactic stage, it was the Batarians whose toes were trodden on first. A bloody first contact war ensued between the two races leaving the Batarians bitter and vengeful. It would be a battle during this war that a ruthless Commander Shepherd as a human Alliance soldier would first draw the attention of friend and foe a like by completing the mission despite the near complete loss of his unit in the process. It will be interesting to see just how much of a threat Batarian extremists pose to Shepherd and the rest of Humanity at the outset of Mass Effect 2.

Now very much attached to the child he struggles to complete his experimental obligations to Cerberus regarding her within the Ascension facility. Grayson later double-crosses the Illusive Man and disappears without trace. According to the blurb of the Drew Karpyshyn’s third Mass Effect novel to be released in the US in July this year, Paul Grayson will return in a Mass Effect 2 prequel as the Illusive Man’s captive and guinea pig as he attempts to combine Reaper technology with human physiology. Whether this particular storyline has any role in the plot of Mass Effect 2 remains to be seen.