Initial Mass Effect 3 review scores (not mine), bugs and other info

I have a series of Mass Effect reviews coming - but I'll preface this by saying this has become one of my favorite gaming series ever.  I unfortunately have to wait a few days to get my copy of Mass Effect 3.  By the time I set aside enough to order the collector's edition for my 360 (one of the only Collector's Editions of anything I've ever bought), they were sold out at Gamestop and Amazon, so I was forced to get it direct from EA.  Downside is it can take 2-5 days to arrive, and I was just notified last night that it shipped, so I have a couple more days to try and wrap up Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning before then.

There are some disquieting concerns though about some bugs.  As  reported on Kotaku, there is an issue where some people have trouble loading in prior characters.  This set of issues apparently comes in two flavors.  One is that Mass Effect 3 cannot determine the custom face from your prior character and returns an error, and it looks like there is a pretty active thread about the issue on BioWare's forum.

Another glitch or concern is apparently you cannot import your characters from the hard drive - it can't be pulled down from Microsoft's new cloud saves feature and used directly.  The bigger catch is this apparently has to be done on your 360 the save file was originally created on?  I'm a bit baffled by this, but here's the help article on EA's site.

I'll be curious to see if I have any issues as I have ME 1 and 2 saves, and some that are linked together and some that are separate, some using the default character setup and others with customized characters and faces.

And for the entire Kotaku article, that can be read here.

In the meantime, this is easily my most anticipated title this year and I am very excited about it.

IGN has a fairly lengthy, detailed review up here, where they scored the game a 9.5.

Gamespot scored it a 9.0 here.

And Metcritic is averaging a 94 right now here.

My own review and thoughts will likely come down the line a bit later as I generally try to beat a game/quit playing the game before I put a review up here, and I tend to do almost all of the side stuff in RPG's (I'm at 85 hrs on Amalur right now but only about 1/3 of the way through the primary story line)