An unkown retailer (hint: rhymes with lametop) may have accidently sold me eternal bliss. That's right, I have in my hands, what might be the best 360 game of this year. I mean that too; it might be better than Bioshock, and it's certainly better than Halo 3. I can't recomend it enough, but in this holiday season of overdrawn accounts, maybe you should know why you need this game more than air.



Well character creation is a good place to start. You can begin the game as John Sheppard, the nice fellow from the commercials, or you can create your own. Custom characters can pick from a handful of past events that fill out the backstory, which will later effect the dialogue in the game. Pick from a handful of classes; which boil down to soldier, tech-healer, biotic (lightsaberless jedi), and then some combinations of the first three. Then create your character's look in a believable, if somewhat limited, character generator. Toss in a name and voila, a very living and breathing looking character is ready to go.

The game throws you in fairly quickly, but not before some very cinematic bits that do a lot to explain the universe around you. You get your first chance to use the dialogue system, and it's pretty good. Not as good as if I was actually talking to someone, but at times it can feel almost that way. The voice acting is quite good, which really helps to bring you into the story. Soon you have to cut the chatter, because things start going horribly wrong. This is when you get your first taste of combat, and it's pretty good. The first thing I thought of was Gears of War, but with much more depth. Just remember; you are not rambo, no matter how badass you think you are, you cannot charge a bunch of entrenched soldiers, and grenades will very much so kill you. Remember to use squad commands, without them your party will not be a very big help in difficult fights. Without orders, your tech guy may suddenly decide to charge some giant robots, and that is not a healthy decision for someone with his defensive stats. Deploy them, give them targets, and remember to flank; it's really not too hard, but it can get a little tricky at times.

Once you're done shooting things you get to tackle the role playing part of the RPG. A huge space city awaits, and the level of detail they put into it is amazing. The sidequests are all fairly interesting, and serve mostly as a way to flesh out the city and the Mass Effect universe. The incentive of XP doesn't hurt either. Speaking of XP, BioWare did something fairly clever in this game. You can gain experience from experiences. Spend a moment to look at the view? Bam, 10 experience points. Have a deep conversation with a diplomat, that counts too. Activities we might call character building will in fact let you build a character.

The main story arch of the game is absolutely amazing, and I'm not really going to say anything else, as I'd hate to spoil it for anyone. So let me just say this. Go get it. Can't afford it? Sell blood. It's that good.