Science fiction and games have enjoyed a lengthy and fruitful relationship. From the early days of Space Invaders and Asteroids, a ‘Sci-Fi’ label has, for the most part, been a vehicle to allow developers to implement features that have no particular place in the real world; from gravity guns with infinite ammunition to hideous slimy abominations to shoot at. You don’t have to feel morally ambiguous about bringing extinction to an unrecognisable species, most of the time the game will tell you they’re evil and that’s enough. Mass Effect is a sci-fi game, granted, but it’s not a game that uses sci-fi premises to justify bonkers gameplay or casual genocide, instead it’s a game that in every way reaches the very loftiest heights of game design and incidentally, takes place in a sci-fi setting.

Mass Effect puts you in the shoes of Commander John Shepard. It’s at this point during a review where we’d normally tell you a little about the character’s background, but we can’t do that. Providing you choose to create your own Shepard, a choice we’re strongly in favour of, it’s yours to decide, in the form of your pre-service history and psychological profile. Both allow you to select from three pre-written backstories; your pre-service history giving you the choice of either being born and bred in space, a colonist who had his family slaughtered, or a young offender-come-good from Earth. Your psychological profile, on the other hand, offers you a choice of outcome from a story in which you defended a Little Bighorn-style onslaught during your early days in the military. The result can be chosen from either the sole survivor (intimating you let everyone else die and played dead), the war hero (you put yourself in the firing line and saved others), or ruthless (which probably means that you used others as human shields, then ate them along with some ‘family pet’ gravy as soon as the food started running short). We’re emphasising these here because the game puts more focus on them than we could have possibly hoped for, with many NPCs commenting on aspects of your past, as well as subsumed story arcs emerging dependent on how you chose. When you take into account the size and scope of the game, to include such additional layers of character depth into the story is unprecedented. You’ll also have complete freedom to change his forename (it’s never used in any of the spoken dialogue – clever), his appearance and even his, or should that be her, gender. While these options don’t necessarily offer enough scope for Shepard to end up looking anything like you (unless you’re a haggard space marine by trade), they do offer a deep enough level of customisation to create a strong lead character that bursts with life and expression. For example, the middle-aged battle-scarred dude with white hair that you see in the shots is how we wanted to play the game, but you can bet that if instead you decided to create, say, a twentysomething female, your perceived experience of the game is likely to be wholly different, though no less immersive.

If you’re looking for plot information in this review, you might as well know that we’re resolutely going to withhold every single detail; spoiling any aspects of the game’s relentlessly entertaining narrative would give us the kind of guilt that usually leads to self harm. Instead, what we’re going to tell you is only that which is unavoidable in adequately explaining the gameplay.

Set in our very own galaxy, initially in a huge alien spaceport called the Citadel, the game tells of a future in which humanity has colonised other planets, and where concepts such as country are no longer relevant to our species. ‘Humanity’ now speaks with one voice in the form of The Alliance, humanity’s militaristic and ambassadorial representation to the galaxy’s other sentient species, which seeks to be perceived as an equal to the other galactic races. Currently seen as an underclass of semi-evolved simians, it’ll be up to you, in part, to improve our relations with the other species of the Citadel and convince them that there are greater things afoot. A species of robotic artificials known as the geth have made a reemergence and are bent on destroying the… STOP! *stabs hands with compass*. We apologise, but any more exposition and we’d have to do ourselves some serious damage.

What’s most striking about Mass Effect, certainly from the outset, is how lifelike BioWare has managed to make the various galaxies’ beings appear to be. This goes way further than just a bunch of decent but generic characters with passable voice acting. Instead, the cocktail of qualities, including lip-syncing, eye movement, gesticulation, expression, and superior voice talent, even in the case of the minor characters, combine to form an overriding and often wholly mind-fooling sense that these ‘people’ are alive. Admittedly, this is not the case with everyone you’ll encounter, some instead choosing to look like fleshy raisins, but generally it’s the rule rather than the exception, which, in a game with as many life forms to shoot the breeze with as Mass Effect, is no less impressive. Furthermore, there are characters in the game that you will actually care about – and we don’t mean the “oh shit, he’s dead, back to the last checkpoint” type caring, but more the “she’s crying, I can’t stand to see her cry” type. As inflated and pompous as it may sound for us to say so, we don’t remember a game that actually engaged us on an emotional level since a certain death in Final Fantasy VII circa 1997, but it’s entirely fair to say that in the case of Mass Effect there were a few moments where we were close. And, just as the ancient texts partially buried in their landscapes and these are a welcome aside for collect-’em-all freaks but will, by and large, be ignored by the masses. More to the point, even if you could land on every planet, would you really want to? Not really, unless you were determined to turn the greatest sci-fi game thus far created into a 500-hour barren rock simulation. In the same vein, each of the planets that you can land on will focus your exploration on either the spaceport and subsequently explorable conurbations, or an area of a few square clicks in which your attention needs to be solely focused. One could argue that ‘exploring planets’ isn’t therefore a fair basis on which to sell the game, but we’d like to point out that planets are big. Very big. And since you drive around them in real-time in your Mako, do you really want to spend the best part of three years in search of an ancient probe that’ll offer you 48 XP for its discovery? No. Thought not.

Driving the Mako is far more fun than it should be. Using a combination of the left and right stick to steer and a tankstyle rotating turret with a complimentary and extremely powerful machine gun, it’s nigh-on impossible to stop the thing with anything less than a sheer cliff, an army of geth, or both. The Mako, as well as giving you a means of landing on and exploring ‘off-piste’ planets that have no particular link to the story, also gives you a way of moving from A to B on those that are more colonised. The first time you’ll use it, for example, is quite near the start, where you’re being constantly told that you have to head over to Peak 17. Being introduced to the Mako as a means of moving from one location on a planet to another is a joyous experience, even in spite of the fact that until you build up some semblance of driving skill, you’re going to get blown up. A hell of a lot.

Mass Effect is, allegedly, an RPG. This means that you’re all going to be expecting item drops, equipment upgrades, XP, levels and so on. And you’d be right, you’ll get all that, but in this particular game it rather unusually takes a back seat. Although it’s fair to say that the number of shots it takes to down an enemy, or for an enemy to do the same to you, will depend heavily on the above factors, as arbitrary RPG conventions such as damage points appearing above the heads of your enemies have been stripped away. For the most part, during a firefight you’ll be stoppingand- popping your way from one point of cover to the next à la Gears Of War, taking down enemies in the finest thirdperson traditions. Instead of playing an RPG with some shooting elements tacked on, though, you’ll sometimes feel like you’re playing a shooter with a deep and strategic level of tweakability, one that’ll keep you interested in messing around with your skills and equipment right up until the final curtain. The character skill upgrading system is role-playing in its purest form though; kills and completed mission objectives equal XP, XP equals level gains and level gains provide you with the ability points you’ll need to upgrade whichever particular facet of your character you feel will serve you best; from skill with a pistol to the art of diplomatic persuasion.

No other game that we can remember has in quite the same way created such atmosphere, nor made us feel that we’re more a part of its epic and brilliantly told story. The way that conversations are handled, for example; simply nudge the stick in the direction of a two or three word description or your general feeling about what is being discussed – generally positive retorts at the top, negative and/ or aggressive comebacks at the bottom. You’ll also have additional diplomatic or threatening options once you’ve levelled up enough in the appropriate areas. Add these naturally flowing and wholly interactive story elements to a set of visuals that, both in terms of design and artistic creativity, raise the bar for both the genre and for videogames in general. Now fortify that with its stirring and brilliant Blade Runner-esque soundtrack, and what you have here is ‘the complete package’. A game of such rare beauty that we spent most of our 25 or so hours with it walking rather than running. A game of such rare emotion that we became attached to our characters and NPCs to the point of missing them now it’s all over. A game of such breathless distinction it will astonish, entertain and shock in equal measure. Mass Effect delivers all of this and asks only for some of your Earth pounds and a chunk of your spare time in return. Simply stunning.

Dan Howdle