Bioware's popularity among Xbox fans began with the release of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and continued with the release of Jade Empire a couple of years later [Although fans of the developer will also be aware of the awesome MDK2 for Dreamcast and PS2! Ed]. Now in the age of the Xbox 360, Bioware's first release for the console is Mass Effect, a completely original space-based action RPG that takes place around two hundred years in Earth's future. Bioware's talent at creating amazing cinematic presentations certainly shines though in Mass Effect - but has it been worth the wait?

At the outset of the story, a human colony known as Eden Prime sends a distress call to the Alliance military and it's intercepted by the SSV Normandy, an Alliance stealth ship using experimental drive technology. As the main character, you are sent down to the planet to investigate the invasion of a synthetic alien race called the Geth. When it's determined that a Turian named Saren is behind the attack, as well as attempting to unlock the universe's oldest and most dangerous secret, you are launched into a heroic saga and epic battle to save humanity from extinction. And that's just the opening! The rest of the review, I promise, will be spoiler free.

The character creation menu is the very first screen that appears when starting a new campaign, cleverly masked as the accessing of classified files on an Alliance database. The character you play, John Shepard, has been pre-created if you want to start off with a straight soldier. Those who are more familiar with the character presets should head into the custom mode to create their own however; you can alter the first name but not the last, as characters call you Shepard constantly. After choosing your gender, facial options can be altered to give the character a unique look. The facial customization is on a par with other titles like Oblivion, but unfortunately without options to adjust the shape of the body. There are six types of classes in the game, three of which are hybrid combinations. Soldiers are excellent at gunplay and get to wear heavy armor, while Engineers are more about directing combat and de-buffing enemies. Adepts are biotic experts who can alter the environment and cause damage with it. The last three classes are combinations of the main three classes, each with specialized benefits. The easiest hybrid class seems to be Vanguard, as you get the raw power of the Adept mixed with the hardened qualities of the Soldier.

Your main character and his or her six crewmates can be outfitted with a variety of weaponry and armor. Each character carries a pistol, shotgun, assault rifle and sniper rifle, but they aren't necessarily trained with each weapon. Your main character also gets to carry grenades, but they are a bit unwieldy to use and slightly underpowered. Armor ranges between light, medium and heavy, as well as custom builds for specific alien species. Additionally, weapons and armor can be custom-fit with modifiers; for instance, you can alter the type of ammo to increase damage on organic life forms or increase the fire rate at expense of the accuracy. You can custom fit nearly every piece of equipment in the game with these modifiers.

It's not just about the guns though, as biotic and tech talent powers offer even more entertaining styles of combat. Biotic abilities allow you to lift unsuspecting enemies high in the air or create a massive field that rips apart the evildoers. You also have an ability to provide an extra layer of protection or create stasis fields to trap enemies. Tech powers can disable enemy weapons, overload shields and hack into robotic enemies for some extra assistance and are also the backbone of breaking into various encrypted devices like storage lockers and errant laptops. As long as you have someone in your squad with these abilities, you don't need to invest skill points on your main character, which is a very handy feature. Also, any single biotic/tech power can be mapped to the right bumper for quick access.

As your character levels up, adding skill points in the correct places can boost damage, improve defense, add talents and open up new armor and weapon options. Skill points are awarded after gaining enough experience to level up and the whole system is very easy to understand; Bioware have included the auto-level function they used in KOTOR, to great effect, which I used frequently for managing the development of my teammates. The Skill screen does an excellent job of explaining each ability and the benefits for upgrading each step of the way; experience points and total health are also viewable here.

Opposite to the turn-based combat in KOTOR, Mass Effect's battles take place in real-time and use a variety of squad commands to direct your teammates. The squad commands are very basic and certainly nowhere near Rainbow Six: Vegas caliber, but they're not trying to be and this is after all an RPG, not a squad-based shooter. Commands consist of move, rally, target and take cover, activated with a tap of the directional pad. The first three work well enough, but 'take cover' seems a little redundant if you use 'move' correctly. The cover system works fairly well for your character; you basically just push up against any object to hide and peek out occasionally to pop off a few shots, similar to Gears of War. The sprint function is also an interesting inclusion, but becomes shorter with heavier levels of armor - it's also a bit difficult to use on a regular basis.

Due to the various types of enemies, the AI takes on different actions based upon the race of the attacker. Geth attackers use cover and attempt to fire from far away, while the Krogan warriors prefer to charge directly at you. There are also a variety of zombies in the game that just kamikaze themselves toward you to explode or spew acid! Unfortunately, the enemy AI is vastly smarter than the AI of your teammates and if you don't give squad commands immediately, as well as choosing talent powers for your teammates to use, they will be picked off very quickly on the advanced levels of difficulty. After killing a batch of enemies, Mass Effect uses an automatic looting system. The main problem with this set up is the menu screen for item acceptance. You only have two options - accept everything or convert one item at a time to omni-gel (which is used to open objects and repair the Mako vehicle, which I'll come to later). There's no option to just leave stuff behind or batch convert items to omni-gel. After accepting all looted items in too many instances, you will hit the 150-item inventory cap and be forced to spend time making room in the inventory. While it's nice to reap the moolah from the sale of inventory items, you will be receiving so many credits in the later stages of the game that it's just not worth the effort.

When you aren't shooting down Geth, you are in constant conversations with characters in the Mass Effect universe. Conversations require a great deal of attention and choosing a response is never a hasty affair. You usually have the option of asking further questions and altering the tone of the ongoing discussion. Additionally, charm and intimidation options eventually open up as blue and red responses respectively. Often they lead to the same goal, but the tactics are severely different. While there is an amazing amount of dialogue options, I found conversations to be somewhat lacking in the amount of humor that made KOTOR so entertaining. Still, listening to the dreary Elcor announce their emotions before speaking a sentence is utterly hilarious. Mass Effect is very much structured like KOTOR in terms of decision making, as you get points for good and bad deeds. These are referred to as Paragon and Renegade and can been seen on the character skills page. They also open up options for further charm and intimidation conversation choices as you progress in either category. It's very easy to tell which actions and words will award the points but I was a bit disappointed with the lack of the payoff. I obtained 100% of my paragon points but didn't receive anything for being such a goody-two-shoes! KOTOR had the luxury of offering Force benefits for 100% achievement, but there's nothing like this in Mass Effect.

Within the pause menu you can find two excellent resources of information; the journal and the codex. The journal keeps track of all current and finished missions; each mission description is easily accessible at any time and often helps guide you on your quest. The codex is a shockingly vast collection of information on nearly every subject within Mass Effect; everything you learn about alien races is input into the codex for further review. With the multitude of planet descriptions and the data in the codex, I can't even begin to imagine the amount of time it took Bioware's writing staff to create and compile all the information - it's beyond impressive! The pause menu also contains the save function, which I'm happy to report is specific to location; you never have to restart at a checkpoint.

Similar to KOTOR, the Normandy spaceship upon which you are based serves as a place to modify your equipment and move the character subplots along. Teammates are spread all over the ship and some investigative legwork is required to find them all. The Normandy also has an area to sell and purchase new supplies - Alliance military issue anyway. While the Normandy's layout is suited to science fiction's take on spaceship design, I really didn't care for riding the slowest elevator in the galaxy down to reach the loading bay! Bioware should have included a simple set of stairs instead. In the loading bay you can modify your team's equipment via a locker system off to the left of the elevator. The other interactive area of the ship is the map system; when accessing the three dimensional space charts in the upper deck of the Normandy, you will be amazed at how far Bioware has come from the KOTOR navigational map. You have the ability to zoom out from planets, systems and clusters and eventually end up looking at the entire known galaxy. When selecting a system, the Normandy shoots off to the new area. You can then travel to each planet, but are limited to surveying most of them. There are typically only one or two planets that can be landed upon in any given system and the map can locate spaceships and asteroids to identify and possibly interact with too.

When you land on a planet for the first time, the Normandy enters a low trajectory drop and allows the Mako infantry vehicle, or rover, to drop onto the surface. Planets all look pretty much the same in terms of structure, but offer different types of terrain like grass, lava and snow. A quick peek at the map highlights points of interest in the nearby area, as well as any mission objectives. You have the ability to leave the rover for mining, looting damaged spacecrafts and entering structures. Occasionally, the planet puts a limit on the amount of time spent outside the rover due to poor weather conditions. Sadly, visiting planets is easily the most boring aspect of the game. Perhaps it's due to the lack of visible life on the worlds, but driving around looking for rocks to mine just isn't much fun. Occasionally Geth enemies or a sandworm creature pop out when you near an anomaly, but it's not enough to keep planet travel exciting. It's like being stuck inside Val Kilmer's Red Planet, but less entertaining and with more aimless wandering. While I can appreciate the quick influx of cash/XP for mining and plundering broken equipment, I'd much rather head to the sub-story objective on the map and skip everything else. But I would like to send Bioware a giant fruit basket for putting a 'Return to Normandy' option in the map screen!

The shielded, six-wheeled Mako is outfitted with a machine gun and cannon as well as jump jets to pop out of a tough incline. The jump jets also come in handy when the rover's undercarriage gets stuck on a rock or seems to be dragging Geth bodies along with it. The Mako handles moderately well, but becomes a little shaky at high speeds. Also, the camera angles are difficult to get a hang of when attempting to back up. My poor Mako suffered so many rocket blasts and plasma bursts because it didn't kick into reverse very easily and the camera angle didn't want to work with me.

Due to the obvious absence of multiplayer, the achievement set is designed for increasing the number of times you play though the story. Total kills are added up over a series of run-throughs and some achievements are awarded for finishing on specific difficulty levels. There are also a couple of quirky achievements like completing a romance subplot or finishing a run-though with more shield damage than health damage. On my first complete run through the campaign, I racked up about 300 to 400 gamerscore points. All in all, it's a solid, challenging set of tasks to complete and somewhat adds to the replay value of the title.

At first glance, Mass Effect is an absolutely stunning example of the raw graphical power of the Xbox 360. Similar to Gears of War, the sheer level of detail will impress anyone within visual range of the high definition television it's being displayed upon. The facial appearances, especially of the aliens, are top notch, bringing each character vividly to life. The lighting effects for the biotic powers are brilliant too, illuminating the area with gorgeous purple plasma power. The character animations are absolutely fluid and react appropriately with rag doll physics to changes in the environment. There is a downside to pushing the 360 to these limits though; the frame rate can slow to a chug during the large-scale battles, especially with lots of talent powers flying around. It's enough to affect the gameplay and become annoying during a fight. This also can happen when you turn your character around too fast; the game pauses for a few seconds to load before you can continue. When you move too fast though an area or conversation, textures don't load quickly enough and you might be staring at a blur until it finishes. I also had problems with the rover land vehicle on planets and the last few levels; specifically, when taken off a steep jump, the front hull of the rover sometimes becomes embedded in the ground and then I couldn't move or exit the vehicle. I can't imagine it's designed to force reloading an old save, so it must be a problem with the hit detection system.

Interestingly, Bioware gives you the option to turn off the film grain and the motion blur effect. On a high definition display, the film grain really makes the image pop with realism and I found that turning it off brings out the flaws in the facial visuals, namely sections around the mouth and eyes that become spotty. Turning off the motion blur doesn't make as much of a difference, but it does make the visuals appear more like a videogame rather than an epic science fiction movie. The deactivating of both settings doesn't help the troubled framerate though.

I can't rave enough about the ensemble of voice actors that have been put together to bring the characters to life. Most of you will recognize the voice of Keith David (Saints Row, Halo 3) as the captain from the trailers, but you will also find celebrities and KOTOR nods in the mix as well. Star Trek: The Next Generation actress Marina Sirtis does an excellent job portraying Saren's second in command and Raphael Sbarge, who many of you will recognize as the voice of Carth in KOTOR, does a solid job for the voice of Kaiden, a crew member on the Normandy. One aspect of the voice cast that's highly under-utilized in the game is Seth Green (the Normandy's pilot). His comical jabs would have been perfect beyond the ship and the number of his recorded lines are far and few between. I'm not much of a Seth Green fan, but his character portrayal of Joker is dead on. Overall, the sheer amount of recorded audio is enough to make your head spin and Bioware deserve major kudos for pulling together such a fantastic cast.

The musical score meanwhile is tremendously expansive and accurately matches the broad nature of the narrative. There are moments that crescendo to an absolute frenzied pace, much of which is due to the moving orchestral tracks during the major plot points in the game. The epic quality of the score reminded me very much of the music in Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan or, to a lesser extent, the fantastic Serenity. The melodies invoke real emotion from the cinematic portions and this translates incredibly well via the videogame medium. The sound effects all match the space theme and portray their designated actions correctly - this is a title begging for a directional sound system if you don't already have one.

I was surprised to find such a high level of commentary on bigotry and racism within the game. Many times the main character is asked their opinion concerning the relationship of humanity to all the alien races in the world. There is even a political party rally towards the end of the game that wants Shepard to endorse their 'pro humanity, anti-alien' candidate. Don't get me wrong though, it's never preachy, overbearing or attempting to establish a correlation with current times - it's just an ongoing debate on the direction that humanity should take and I found it to be a refreshing, highly intelligent aspect of the story that's rarely, if ever, seen in a videogame.

I completed the single player game on a combination of Normal and Hard difficulty at character level 42 in a little over twenty-three hours. I'd imagine that you could possibly blow through the single player story in twelve to fifteen hours if you avoid all the side missions, but you would miss out an enormous amount of entertaining material by doing so. For those who are wondering about the possible trilogy aspect, be assured that you will receive a clear, decisive ending to this portion of the tale - it's extremely satisfying and still does a great job of setting up a sequel. With a mass of achievements still awaiting me, I've already started working on my evil character, which is much more of a biotic talent junkie. I am saddened to find out most of the character responses are exactly the same on the opposite end of the conversation spectrum, but it has opened up a couple of new side-story options. Also, I'm very intrigued to change the main storyline choices that I made, to discover the various different endings.

Mass Effect certainly has a few flaws, but it's easily the most enthralling space adventure that's ever been created for a video game platform. It honestly makes the Halo narrative look like amateur hour! Much of the credit goes to a writing staff that has created this stunning game world with nothing more than pure imagination. While Mass Effect isn't a revolutionary step for Bioware, it's certainly evolutionary. Combining the elements that made KOTOR so entertaining with a combat system that's much more accessible for the teeming masses of shooter fans, the end result is a highly successful experience that almost every type of gamer should absolutely love - it's already become one of my favorite games of all-time! Mass Effect really deserves to hit the top of the bestsellers list this holiday season and every Xbox 360 owner needs to check it out now, or they'll be missing out on one of the most amazing gaming experiences currently available on any system.

Reviewed by James Fanciullo for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).