Mass Effect review

Your boss called. He's busy, so he needs you to take care of a few things today: Take the new spaceship on a test run, buy milk, discover an ancient alien civilization, save all organic life in the galaxy from annihilation, and get yourself a little cosmic bow-chicka-bow-wow in the process. If you don't think you can get all that done, he says he can probably wait until the weekend for the milk.

Well, of course it's impossible. But it's exactly what you do in Mass Effect, a starry-eyed space opera that melds the deep story and character development of a role-playing game with the bullets-flying action of a squad-based shooter. It's one part talking to the good aliens, two parts blasting big, gooey holes in the bad ones, and one part monster trucking over distant planets in your six-wheeled, cannon-turreted space buggy. It's also fan-bloody-tastic.

We'll start with the talking, which is actually Mass Effect's greatest strength. Hollywood wishes it could find a script and story like this. It starts with the discovery of an alien artifact (yet somehow it doesn't feel like Halo or 2001: A Space Odyssey) and ends with you rescuing literally every intelligent organism in the Milky Way from a grisly, violent death.

Too vague for you? Sorry. To say more would give too much away. Just trust that it's all great: plot, characters, voice acting, the sheer sense of scale - everything. Add in fantastic graphics and a cinematic flair, and the end result is a truly memorable story. Our only complaint was that it ended too soon - we wanted more.