Title: And a Shepherd to Lead Us
Author: A Very Thirsty Megalomaniac
Rating: M
Genre: SciFi
Pairing: None but I think lesbian!Shep was implied at some point
Chapters: 27 and counting
Words: 132k
Published: 19th March, 2014
Status: WIP with regular updates
Summary: With the Earth ravaged by Combine negligence and xenian wildlife, the human/vortigaunt combined alliance takes to the stars. Commander Adrian Shepard (descendant of Cpl. Adrian Shephard, whose "H" was a casualty to history and poor spelling) sets to combat the new Reaper threat while shadow forces struggle to determine what humanity's future is going to look like.
Link: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10199872/1/And-a-Shepherd-to-Lead-Us

Prompted by Xandrel I went looking for a decent Half-Life crossover the other day. The only thing I could find was this.

The story does a good job at merging the Half-Life and Mass effect universes together almost seamlessly. The character are reasonably believable.

Unlike a majority of Mass Effect fics, it's not a rehash by the looks of it.

I'm floating around a 3/5 or 4/5 atm with this. I'll give a harder number once I've slept on it.

 

It's an novel concept, I'll give it that. However, it felt too much like a playthrough of Mass Effect GOTYE by Valve. There's not enough divergence from the plot of the games for me to justify reading it through over simply playing them.

Pacing's all over the place and the characters are varied, but flat in comparison to what the games give us. There's hardly any suspense, and the layer of intrigue doesn't look like it will resolve itself until the fic reaches game 3. At the rate it's going, there won't be any payoff until Half-Life 3 is released.

2/5.