The role-playing experience can vary dramatically, depending on what sort of game you choose to play. There are those who prefer to get together every other week, gathered around the kitchen table with pizza, rulebooks and bits of paper, rolling dice until the wee hours of the morning. Then there are the online role-players, logging hundreds of hours on the same character in the same virtual world, fighting scripted dragons alongside players from countries all over the world in the pursuit of treasures with shinier graphics and bigger numbers.

Then there are the single-player RPGs. These are very personal experiences between the player and the game -- like reading an action-packed book where you are the hero, and your choices dictate the way all the key events play out.


Mass Effect is a single-player role-playing game by BioWare, launching the player into space on a science-fiction adventure that breaks new ground in videogaming. Playing Mass Effect transports you to a not-too-distant future where mankind has discovered technologies that have catapulted it into space. Aliens have been working together or waging bitter wars for many years, and humanity has been quick to begin colonizing different planets, visit distant star systems, and make a name for itself in the galaxy.

Space As You've Never Seen It Before

Mass Effect will drop you into the heavily armored boots of one Commander Shepard, a space marine whose approach to the challenges of tomorrow must be tackled by you today. You'll blast lots of space robots into oblivion, and collect plenty of new weapons and armors, but this is more a game about experiencing a tantalizingly original vision of the future, and deciding for yourself how best to experience it.

Mass Effect's greatest strength is the quality of the narrative. BioWare has a track record of producing amazingly engrossing storylines, but never before have you been presented with this level of meaningful interaction. You'll experience difficult and thought-provoking situations, including moral and ethical questions without a clear right or wrong answer. The Commander Shepard character is thus defined by player involvement, sublimely capturing the essence of role-playing.

The trappings of the medium do limit how free you are to pursue different approaches to in-game situations. Your ability to make the more interesting choices is tied directly to how many points you've dropped into the Charm or Intimidate talents, for instance. And as should be expected, different responses to the same issue will often lead to similar, if not exactly identical results. While some of the side-stories could have been explored to greater lengths and with more payoff than a paragraph of text, the main storyline is very strong.