Finished Mass Effect

So I finished Mass Effect this weekend, and I have to admit that I'm torn. It was a really fun game, but had a lot of lame to it.

Good

* The game had a captivating storyline while still remaining somewhat open to exploration. A lot of games either drag you kicking and screaming through the storyline, or they are so open to exploration that you forget there even is a story at all. I thought Mass Effect had a nice mixture of the two.

* Reasonably compelling characters that were actually fun to play. Even though I exclusively used Wrex and Talia through the entire game, I didn't find any characters I simply couldn't stand.

* Beautiful graphics.

Bad

* So I can travel at faster-than-light speeds... but the elevator in my ship can only travel at 1m/min? The game was full of infuriatingly slow elevators for no good reason. They didn't serve as loading screens -- no no, you'd get off the elevator and THEN you'd get to load.

* Abrupt termination of the storyline at the end really sucked. Here's this awesome story about how evil all these critters are. You kill ONE and then..well... oops, we're done. It looks like the producers ran out of money part of the way through the project and just gave up.

* I can travel all around the universe... and yet there's only about 20 places for me to go in it? And all of them are mild variations of one another? Lame. The graphics are so compelling, but the level design -- especially for indoor scenes, was laughably poor.

All told, I liked the game. It was well worth the "free" I paid for it. But it was still disappointingly short in terms of play time. My wish list for ways this game could have been different is actually pretty short:

1) Random level design for the worlds and bunkers.

and/or

2) Continue the storyline to an actual completion instead of copping out.

Had they done either one of these things, then I wouldn't feel the game was too short. #1 would allow me to keep exploring and completing random side quests. Oblivion did a great job of this. Mass Effect, not so much. Had they done #2, I think it would have added another few dozen hours to the play time.

Would anyone else like to share their thoughts on the game?