This article is on Mass Effect, a game for the XBOX 360 and PC created by BioWare. The main concept of this game is that it is a space exploration RPG with some shooter elements. You play as Shepard, who is a commander of a ship who is also completely unique depending on who plays him or her. For Shepard can be a boy or girl. Shepard can be old or young. And Shepard can look like whatever you want him to, although only if it falls within the 10 face shapes and 12 eye types etc.
This is one of many reasons why I think this is a game to play before you die. Most games struggle in the RPG category from either sound problems or lack of variety. For example in morrowind the only time you saw your characters name was in text. This game however allows you to give your character a completely original first name and yet still utilizes the full extend of spoken word, no part of this is reading except for speech choices and subtitles.
Which brings me on to the speech choices, these are easily set out in a disc shape at the bottom of the screen with up to 6 choices around it. Selecting the choices involve simply selecting it using an analog stick or mouse. Although when you select a choice the description may be only a few words, the character Shepard will actually say more in the script based upon what you say and also previous decisions.
The game allows you to take multiple routes in creating your character, most simply allowing you to be a Paragon or Renegade (Good or Evil), but also letting you choose a character class and background story before the game starts, affecting certain missions or scripts. The main combat element of the game involves 4 weapon classes (Assault Rifles, Shotguns, Pistols and Sniper Rifles). There are hundereds of these weapons ranging form level I to X. Also there are ammo upgrades and performance upgrades for the weapons as well as armour and armour upgrades and a grenade launcher and grenade upgrades.
What I'm saying is that the weapon customization is HUGE, like most of the customization in the game. The game also has massive replayability value by letting you restart the game at the same level and with the same equipment as when you finished. Getting acheivements is a biog challenge in the game as you would expect it to be.
And I haven't even got to the biggest part of the game, the exploration and side missions. The game is set all across the Milky Way galaxy, and includes around 20 different clusters and over 50 systems and very near to 500 planets. Of course it is impossible to land on every planet, so BioWare made it seem realistic, letting you land on planets that we're between certain suface temperatures and pressures etc. This means that you may only be able to land on 1 planet in each system (not Earth sorry, but the moon you can :D). And the size of the planets themselves are very big areas that would take a good 30 minutes to an hour each to ensure you found everything on them.
So in all this game is a truly great RPG experience with enormous customization capabilities and very few technical problems, the most obvious of these is that rendering times for some of the textures are quite slow.
And all these reasons pull together to show why i think this game is a game to play before I die.
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