When my time was up, and they came to collect the controllers I didn’t want to leave. I was right in the middle of an engrossing story line that grabbed me from the start and that I won’t be able to stop thinking about until I get the game back in my grubby little hands when it launches November 20th.Let me cut to the chase. Mass Effect is fantastic, glorious, beautiful, immersive, and even from the brief few hours I had a chance to play I can tell you this is the real deal. Is that enough hyperbole for you yet? Well it’s all true. Of course, none of this should come as any surprise when you look at who is behind the game; those wonderfully talented frozen game doctors at Bioware. Enough well deserved praise though, let’s dig into Mass Effect.

Before starting on your journey, you need to choose or create your character. A default male and female option are available for use, but it’s a lot more fun to take the time and dive into the game’s many customization options. As mentioned above, you can choose to play as either a male or female “Sheppard”. The last name is locked, but any first name is fair game. My favorite during the morning demo was of course “German Sheppard”, followed closely by the great and powerful “Awesome Sheppard”. Your choice of sex will have an impact on a few of the romance plots, as well as the obvious things like being addressed as him or her. The facial creation system is fairly robust as you can modify and tweak a variety of things such as eyes, cheeks, nose, moth, hair, skin tone and much more. Just be sure you’re happy with what you create because once you start the game, it can’t be changed. Speaking of the faces though, the facial animations and lip synch work on all of the characters is excellent. Not only that but during dialogue the camera will change angles giving everything a cinematic feel.

Once you are happy with how you look, its time to choose your character’s background history. The three options were spacer, colonist and earthborn. As a spacer, you have existed your entire life on a starship, and being in space comes as second nature. The colonist knows the difficulties of trying to establish a life in space, while the Earthborn was raised in the slums on earth and will have a mean edge to them. During the game, certain subplots may or may not be available to each type, and certain characters will show bias or favoritism towards you.

On top of your background history, you can also choose your characters “psych”. The psych profiles have more to do with a major event that has shaped your military career so far. It is basically what defines how you will behave or react to a variety of military situations, and as with your background, certain characters will either praise or resent you for what you’ve done in the past. The “ruthless” psych has to do with a past military event where you famously went to far, beyond the limits of normalcy, and enacted or took part in an act of revenge outside or normal protocol. The “war hero” psych means you were instrumental in securing victory in one of humanities greatest victories, and people revere you for those acts. The final option, the “sole survivor”, has you having survived against all odds in a great battle where most perished.

The final choice you will have to make before starting the game is your character class. Among the six you can choose from are Soldier, Engineer, Adept, Infiltrator, Sentinel, and Vanguard. Depending on what you choose you will specialize in certain areas such as weapons, tech, or biotics. For instance, the Engineer class is a tech specialist, and excels at things like repair, decrypting security systems, and modifying technical equipment. On the flip side they are limited to using only light armor, and can only level up their pistol skills. If you want to focus on weapons, the soldier is probably the class you will want to use. A soldier can specialize in assault rifles and pistols, as well as wear heavy armor. As someone who enjoys shooting first and asking questions later, this is the class I chose. As Mass Effect is a class based action RPG, the importance of balancing your squad out becomes important. Using my soldier class as an example, I will want to seek party members who specialize in biotics, and probably keep an engineer around to open those tricky doors. The developers even mentioned that one of the classes (Vanguard I think) is heavily focused on hanging back in battle and providing support for your two other squad mates rather than engaging directly. The coolest thing I saw was that once in game and choosing your party members for a mission, it will let you know how your party ranks overall in weapons, tech, and biotics. So what you choose for a character class will have a great impact on how the game plays out. This adds enormous replay value that will have you playing through several times.

One of the best things I found out about was how the save system works. In previous games such as KOTOR, if you wanted to play multiple characters at once, you had to keep track of what game saves belonged to what character. I can’t tell you how pissed I was when I overwrote my 40 hour evil Jedi save with my 10 hour good Jedi campaign. In Mass Effect, the concept of “careers” is introduced. Each career is where you keep all of a particular characters game saves. As an example, when playing as “Jake Sheppard”, when I go to save my game I will only be able to see all of those character specific saves. That way, when I am off killing mindless aliens as Lauren Sheppard, I can’t impact or accidentally overwrite any one else’s save files. The save system also allows you to save anywhere except when you are in combat. I’m not sure if scary music plays just before ambushes in this game, so to be safe, save early and often and you should be fine.

With all of the house keeping out of the way, its time to actually start playing the game. It’s a testament to Mass Effect’s design that even in the character creation screen you have already been role playing and learning about your version of commander “Sheppard”. The game opens with a gripping cinematic score and right from the start you know the journey is going to be something special. After a brief introduction to some key characters and a bit of back story, you are sent out on your first mission. During this intro section of the game, you are able to converse with several characters and get a bit more information on the story so far. There is also an informative codex in the menu screen that keeps and catalogues important information. The thing that really grabbed me right away is just how natural the conversation system really is. Every line of dialogue is spoken, so unlike in previous titles such as KOTOR, everything has a more natural flow too it. And rather than choosing from a set of predetermined lines when responding, you actually choose the type of response or what the general emotion you want to convey is. So for instance, if you are getting fed up with someone, rather than choosing a full line of dialogue like “Ok I’ve had enough it think its time I go”, you instead choose something like “Shut Barney Up”. It is very dynamic and engaging to direct a conversation this way, and really means you have to role play your character like never before. It’s actually kind of fun to react how you would in a real life situation, and see how the story plays out. Later in the game you can even increase your charm and persuasion skills, and this unlocks further dialogue choices you may not have had before. One of the developers even mentioned that a few key plot elements could be solved solely by working through a conversation tree in the correct way, and a battle could be avoided altogether. It will be hard to go back to the old way of conversing in an RPG; because the way Mass Effect does it just feels so natural.

The combat system has seen several iterations during development, and has been shown in various forms over the past few years. I remember a few years back seeing the ability to pause combat, and strategically place squad member destinations on the map like a chess game. All of that is gone now. You can still pause the action by bringing up the combat or tech wheels (LB or RB), but this just allows you to switch out weapons and ammo types without any penalty or losing your edge in combat. The direction Bioware finally settled on for combat was an action / strategy hybrid with a fairly decent cover system. At times you will feel like you are playing a solid third person shooter, while at other times it will feel more like a tactical action game where flanking is the key to victory (think Full Spectrum warrior only you are pulling the trigger). Since you do have unlimited ammo, when you are in cover there is no blind fire as we’ve been seeing in a lot of game recently. Popping in and out of cover works really well, but if you don’t use cover expect to die more often than you survive. Rushing headfirst into a combat situation is not the recommended approach, even as a soldier. To combat the fact that you never run out of ammo, each weapon can overheat. This prevents you from just holding down the fire button and spamming an area with bullets.

You have several options at hand to dispatch the many enemies you will be facing. There are the traditional weapons such as pistols, shotguns, assault rifles, and sniper rifles. Throughout your adventures you can find variations and different weapon models, and they can also be modded and upgraded. If that’s not enough, there are also various ammo types you can find such as armor piercing or explosive. Combined with your player class abilities, you can really focus in on what works best for you in a particular situation. As an example, in some combat I decided to try out some sniping. Being that I was playing as a soldier, and that my character was very low level, the sights bobbed up and down rapidly. With a lot of effort I was still able to line up my shots, but it was less than optimal. If I had a class focused on sniper skills, eventually I would be able to greatly improve my aim and steadiness with the long rod. Once again, Mass Effect is all about customizing the game how you want to play it, and focusing on the combat choices that you enjoy. It’s a testament to Mass Effect’s design philosophy that two different play throughs of the game could be so varied and unique. If shooting and blowing things up is not your style, you can focus more on technical skills and biotics. Biotics are akin to magic in a way. You can do things like throw an opponent across the screen, or disable their weapons ability to vent heat, making them into harmless fools.

After spending some time on the first planet, and then getting to the sort of hub world of the game know as the Citadel, one thing became very apparent; there are a ton of missions and side quests in Mass Effect. Everywhere I went I was presented with an opportunity to help someone out, or unravel another morsel about the story. I can see easily being distracted and just losing my self in the world Bioware has created. The galaxy map on your ship, the Normandy, is simply one of the coolest maps I’ve ever seen in a game. If you want to talk about seeing some epic adventure laid out before you, taking one look at this galaxy map will do the trick. While the developers we met with never discussed exactly what it would be, they did say that Mass Effect would support post release downloadable content. My guess would be things like new weapons and armor, as well as new planets to explore. Nothing confirmed on that front. What they also talked about was Mass Effect 2 and 3, and how they really wanted a way for you to take your character from the first game, over onto these sequels. They wouldn’t actually specify how they were going to accomplish this, but did mention the team had a Eureka moment and once they do reveal those plans that we would be satisfied with the solution they came up with.

A few more things I want to mention before I go back to my perpetual state of dreaming about playing Mass Effect again. Graphically, the game is gorgeous. It is by far one of the best looking games I’ve seen up and running on the 360. The art design, and the overall feel that this is a living breathing universe is fully realized. One thing I noticed was that a “film grain” feature is on by default, as well as “motion blur”. You can turn these on or off in the menu options if you like, but I found they gave the game a really attractive look. The character models and facial animations are breathtaking. Having a conversation plays out as if you were directing your own sci-fi adventure. While certain creatures borrow here and there from space lore such as star wars and star trek, for the most part the Mass Effect universe and the species that inhabit it look unique.

In a few short weeks, the rest of world will finally be blessed with the chance to play Mass Effect. They will get a chance to create their own version of the Commander Sheppard story, and dive into what has to be, at least in my opinion, one of the most ambitious games ever made.