I was having a really hard week about two weeks ago. The constant schedule of a day job mixed with the yearning to be somewhere else and a dash of missing the significant other all culminated into a black cloud hanging over my head. All of the collective “blehs” ended the moment I got home from work and found that my beautiful and awesome wife had picked up the game that I had been longing for all week long, Mass Effect.

I could hardly contain myself; I couldn’t wait to rip open the packaging and take a whiff of that new-game-smell (you know the one). I finally had the game in my hands, the one game that I had been waiting impatiently for months until its release. I had the bare minimum pre-order from my local GameStore branch since September, but I was unable to pick it up because of the staggering cost of the Rock Band box set.

I put the game into my Xbox 360 and proceeded to lose the next week of my life to the sheer addictiveness of this game. I couldn’t be bothered to customize my character. I wanted to get right in on the action. I took the reigns as Commander John Shepherd (the sole surviving member of Alliance mission that had gone horribly awry early on in his service) and started my grand adventures across the mysterious regions of the Milky Way galaxy.

Don’t worry, in this short impressions post, I won’t reveal any spoilers. Upon finishing your first compulsory mission, you report to the “Citadel”, the center of all galactic trading and diplomacy. Here, the game begins to truly open up into an open-ended story-driven RPG that spans a good three quadrants of the galaxy. Each sector of the galaxy you visit has multiple planets within multiple systems for you to research and explore. Nearly every planet you land on has its own story, its own politics, its own indigenous species inhabiting it that you can have fun trying to shoot or run over in the Mako, your the planetary landing craft.

The dialogue wheel, if you haven’t any played the game or its spiritual predecessors in the Knights of the Old Republic series, takes a little getting used to but is ultimately more rewarding than any other dialogue system that I’ve ever played. The amount and diversity of conversations that you can potentially have with the NPCs and main characters in the game is staggering.

The story was good enough to warrant a prequel book called Mass Effect: Revelation by Drew Karpyshyn, who was also one of the head writers for the game’s story and dialogue. You’ll know by the end of the book if you want to play Mass Effect in full. It’s not necessary to read the book because the designers were thoughtful enough to include the back-story in conversations you have with members of your crew and various other characters.

To give you the gist of the story without spoiling any of the game’s deliciousness, in 2148 humanity finds ruins of an alien race on Mars. These ruins contained technology that was far above our own. We then reverse engineered the alien artifacts which gave the human race a push forward in our own technological evolution. Ships capable of faster-than-light speed were realized, but expansion into other solar systems was still a far off fantasy. We continued to explore our own backyard in the Sol system, going finally to Pluto where we found something that would change the course of human history forever, the mass relay. What we thought was simply a moon orbiting Pluto was actually a huge piece of alien technology that allowed near instantaneous travel between star systems within our own galaxy.

The events in this game take place 35 years after this discovery with humanity being the next up-and-coming species vying for a position on the Citadel Council. In order for the humans to be taken seriously, they wish to have a representative of the human race serve as a Spectre, an agent of the Council that is above the law and serves to protect the galaxy no matter the cost. You are the candidate that the Systems Alliance (Earth’s governing body) has had their eye on for many years to fill this position. The first level of the game is your trial by fire, so to speak, as to whether you’ll do well as a Spectre. I can’t give you any more of the story without spoiling the finer intricacies of the storyline or biasing you on to which path you should take in the game.

Let’s get to the best part of the game, the sound. In short, the music is magnificent. The song that you hear at the end credits has been on heavy rotation on my iPod since I beat the game. The rest of the music is a neat mix of ambient with trance techno that is eerily reminiscent of the Blade Runner soundtrack mixed with that of The Fifth Element. The voice acting is superb; there are a few character voices that you’ll recognize immediately like Marina Sirtis as Matriarch Benezia and Seth Green as the quick-witted brittle-boned pilot of the SSV Normandy, Joker. The amount of dialogue that they recorded is simply staggering considering that they had to record each line twice due to swapping the pronouns “he” with “she,” and the same dialogue spoken by Shepherd had to be said by both a male and female character.

I loved the aesthetic style of this game. It reminded me a lot of designs by Masamune Shiro and Mœbius. For those who don’t know Masamune Shiro is a graphic novel artist whose works have been turned into numerous anime. Some of his more well known titles are Ghost In The Shell, and Appleseed. Mœbius (aka Jean Giraud) is well known as an artist, but had done much for sci-fi with his work he did as art director in famous movies as The Fifth Element and Tron. He even contributed to Team Andromeda’s masterpiece video game Panzer Dragoon.

The graphics are the one area of the game that I have a huge gripe with. There are a ton of texture draw-in problems that honestly shouldn’t be happening in games of this caliber. Otherwise, the amount of graphical detail is amazing. Who would have known that the future of humanity would be in minimalism interior decoration? The character models are wonderful looking as long, and as you don’t expect them to be completely human, they near the uncanny valley with this games character models. The alien species are perhaps the coolest thing this game has to offer; the Turians are by far my favorite new species of alien, especially Saren (the antagonist).

The easiest way to describe the gameplay would be “Gears of Oblivion;” Mass Effect is a great third-person perspective shooter with RPG elements. The combat system was very intuitive, but the equipment system gets slightly ridiculous if you’re not the micromanaging type. Also, DO NOT rely on the game’s autosave feature to bail you out. Make a habit of saving your game often, and you’ll have the time of your life.

The pacing of the game is perfect for gamers like me who like to take their time with games of this scale. Don’t believe all of the hate that people are giving about the length of this game; it can take twelve hours to beat the game if you’re rushing or upwards of thirty hours if you truly take your time to complete the side quests and collection missions. I’m sure I didn’t get all of the objectives finished my first time around (something I hope to remedy on this second play through), but that’s the beauty of games like this. The game is different for each person who plays it.

Oh yeah, avoid using elevators in the Citadel; use the public transit system, its much faster.

The bottom line is this: if you are a sitting on the fence about this game, rent it first. For sci-fi and RPG lovers like me, I felt like I was playing in my own movie. This game does not convert people who don’t enjoy this type of game normally, though I was amazed to get home from work one night to see that my wife had started her own game.