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STAR WARS, STAR TREK, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate, The Matrix… If any of these names have any appeal to you then Mass Effect is the game for you. And if none of these appeal to you, keep reading anyway; because Mass Effect is still an experience no one should miss! To say this game is epic in design is an understatement. This very well may be the first real step we've seen towards an interactive movie. This feature production is brought to you by Bioware, a developer than seems unable make a bad game; especially when they are Role Playing Games (RPGs). Before we get into all the details and goodies of the game let us quickly get the negatives out of the way.

There is texture popping – the same kind seen in Gears of War – and the occasional dip in frame rate when the action picks up. Side quests can also become repetitive. They usually involve landing on a large, yet mostly empty, planet; then you must find a base, mine or research facility. Then proceed to kill whatever is inside or occasionally speaking to someone before or after said killing rampage. Also, driving around the various planets can become somewhat repetitive and dull after a while due to the size and bareness of most of them. It can be particularly frustrating when getting stuck trying to climb a mountain in your vehicle; which you'll have to do often. It would have been nice if some side quest planets were more detailed and structured like the main story planets. The driving controls also aren't that good, which isn't really acceptable with games like Halo showing everyone how to do it. The combat makes the game look and play similar to a shooter but Mass Effect isn't really one and therefore never feels like it's as good as it should be. Perhaps it would have been better to make the combat more purely action based, like Gears of War, instead of running so many RPG elements in the background. When shooting at someone, we believe your accuracy should be based on how accurately you can physically aim at them, not a stat number that represents your character's accuracy. The last gripe, and certainly the least, is an inventory system that can be a little time consuming to sort through, especially if you've been neglectful to look at and manage it for a while.

But that's it! Those were our issues; the rest of the game is an experience that we feel comfortable calling the next evolution in the Action RPG genre. First, there is the fantastic story, which may not have the cool twist we've come to expect from Bioware's storytelling but is still tasty sci-fi goodness. It's well thought out, extremely well written, detailed and feels like a classic, great sci-fi story which sucks you in with great characters, galactic politics and epic backdrops for the action. You can choose to follow the main story only or you can also explore other planets throughout the galaxy and do a variety of side quests. Depending on how you play, the game will either feel like a blockbuster sci-fi movie or a Sci-fi TV series with good filler episodes and other greater episodes that spill more info about the main story.

For this space drama you play as Commander Shepard. During character creation you get a few starting choices, such as gender and your characters history background, which will effect how people react to you throughout the game. Then of course you must choose your class such as the traditional Soldier (fighter), Adept (sci-fi magic user) and Technician (buffer) or one of three other classes which is a weaker mix of two of the other classes. The game also has a pretty robust facial creation system where you can create the look of your character. It is very deep and if you take the time, you really could make your character look like almost anyone. The game puts you in command of a ship called the Normandy and her fairly large crew. The game does a great job of making you truly feel like the commander of a ship. We won't give away too much of the plot, but the gist of it is at the start is you will be hunting a Rogue Spectre (special galactic peace keepers who are above the law) named Saref. He's got an army of robots following him attacking random planets in the galaxy. There is obviously a lot more to this, but part of the fun is finding out what he's really doing and his motives for it. Early in the game you will become the first human Spectre, which is important because it means your actions will partially represent the entire human race, and humans are still pretty new to this galactic community. We only discovered them about 20-30 years before the games main plot. There is a lot of politics going on in this galaxy and you will have your part in shaping it. We cannot wait to see how some decisions will affect future games in the trilogy.

There are some great characters in this game and you will be joined by a variety of both Alien and Human party members. The voice acting is some of the best we've heard in a game to date. There are of course the usual options of getting to know their backgrounds and possible romantic subplots. In fact, Mass Effect almost got banned in Asia because it contains a lesbian love scene between a female Shepard and female Alien characters. We're sure many copies of the game will sell for this fact alone... Nice!

Alien love aside, Mass Effect is a big game, with many innovations to the genre. The first being it's conversation wheel. Instead of the usual conversation tree where you get a few options of what your character can say and then hearing the response, this time you choose the attitude of your characters response. All the conversations in Mass Effect are voiced including your character. So part of the fun is never quite knowing what your character is going to say or do. This can lead to some really funny, cool and even shocking responses from your character. It also gives conversations a much better flow and realness to them. It almost feels as if you are a movie director controlling each scene.

These conversations will often present you with choices. Choice is a big part of Mass Effect and we're not just talking in the good or evil way either. There is a considerable amount of grey in this game. This also leads to the two types of leanings your character can have. First there is Paragon, who is the "by the books" type of guy and then there's the Renegade, who does whatever it takes to get the job done. In truth, this doesn't have a huge impact of game play except for boosting your ability to either charm or intimidate people. This can be important as there are certain situations that can only be resolved peacefully by having one of these full. Getting back to my point about choice, Mass Effect is the first game in a long time that caused me to actually sit and stare my TV screen for 10 minutes because we actually could not decide what we wanted to do. You will have to make some tough choices in this game. That kind of connection and involvement in a game is something pretty rare these days. We were completely sucked into Bioware's Galaxy.

Speaking of which, not only is it huge and well detailed but also filled with some very interesting and original Aliens. We hope that some will be more deeply explored in future games or downloadable content as not much was shown or told about a few of them. It would be especially cool to visit a few homeworlds; if only to see what Bioware's creative art department would come up for some of them.

Mass Effects graphics can range from really good to absolutely amazing; often being one of the best looking games on the system. When wanting to describe some of the planets you get to explore, we find this is one of those rare moments where the most appropriate word seems to be, stunning. The detail is fantastic. One of our favourite moments was after landing on a planet and noticing tiny insects flying in front of our camera's view. There seems to be no other reason for this other than to show this planet has a lot of flies… Like Australia.

If you were to watch the combat in Mass Effect you would be excused for thinking it played like Gears of War. You duck in and out of cover while shooting your enemies and use a variety of Biotic (magic) and technician abilities. You may also give basic commands to your squad mates; two of which may join you for each planet mission. Sadly, however, this is not like Gears of War but an action RPG and Bioware have seemed to put the RPG part first. Combat is more strategic than action packed. It's still good, but you need to get your head around how it works otherwise you will die, a lot. You may pause the game at anytime and bring up a power wheel, which allows you to look around and command you and your teammates to use certain abilities on any target you like. Then un-pause and watch it all happen. This allows you to get your team to act in sync and is necessary to use for some of the tougher battles.

To be honest, we have barely scratched the surface of everything Mass Effect has to offer. Here's a quickly summary of the cooler parts of this game that would take too long to go into detail about. There are tons of great looking planets to explore, survey and read up about; not to mention random spacecrafts floating through space you can discover and board. There is a fairly deep inventory system involving different amours, weapons and various upgrades for each. It will become important to adjust the type of ammunition and upgrades you use for the different enemies you are encounter. Xbox Achievements acually have in game rewards, something we hope other developers catch onto. Then there is the Mako, possibly the coolest tank/hummer with jump jets ever. This is what you ride around in when exploring the different planets and their various mountains. Riding up mountain cliffs in the Mako is very cool and we swear the thing was build by cats. It always seemed to land on its feet, not matter how much we tried to flip it over.

Upgrading your character is handled in a fairly tradition sense. When you level up you gain skill points, which you can then spend on upgrading your different skills and learning new abilities. Best of all, your party members all level up with you and you get just as much control on their upgrades as your own character. The character chart is easy to understand and tells you exactly how many points you need to spend in a certain skill before gaining a new ability.

In this game, the possibilities are endless and that's what Mass Effect is so good at. We doubt it'll be anytime soon that someone sees every possible combination of scenarios and results in the game. We don't want to give away any spoilers – and we won't – but by the end of the game you would have made some large decisions that not only have an impact of your character, your crew, the fate of the galaxy but also will also have (we're assuming) a large impact on the start of the sequel to this Trilogy of this Sci-fi gaming gold. Also with downloadable content on the horizon, this very well could turn into the first interactive sci-fi show/game if Bioware chooses to make it episodic content with new stories and planets to visit. Like we said… the possibilities are endless.