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Roam (and Jump) If You Want To

To paraphrase historian J.M. Roberts, Mass Effect's universe is like an interstellar desert swarming with superficialities. Yes, you can travel to dozens of systems with dozens more planets, but you can only effectively land on a handful, and only a fraction of those have meaningful locations to visit. The rest are populated with generic artifacts, outposts, dig sites, and debris. You'll explore these with the Mako, which looks like a six-wheeled rover with a cannon and turret on top and which can "hop" a couple meters straight up, using button-triggered jets. As you bump and shimmy over the repetitiously rugged terrain looking for stuff to salvage, you'll occasionally encounter wormy creatures that pop out of the ground and attack, leading to one of the game's sillier mechanics, where the Mako jumps like a certain infamous Italian plumber to avoid incoming projectiles.