The demo had us control Mass Effect 2's lead character, the human hero Commander Shepard, as he and two other members of his team storm a building in a vast super-city (think Corasaunt in the Star Wars movies) to get to an alien female baddie. The end result is that Shepard and his team end up with some help in the end; a new alien lizard like character who thinks nothing of sneaking up behind someone and breaking his or her neck.

While there were examples of BioWare's trademark branching conversation system, most of the game was all about doing some Gears of War-style cover shooting to get to the headquarters. Shepard had to deal with armed aliens, nasty robots and even some rocket positions at the end. Obviously the full version of the game will have characters deal with special abilities and skills that need to be improved but none of that was really needed in our PAX 2009 demo; we just used our standard rifle, covered and poked our heads out to shoot, and soon pretty much every enemy was down for the count.