Mass Effect

2007 was the year of gaming, and one of the best RPGs to come out last year was Mass Effect.
STORY: You control Commander Shepard, your mission is to protect the universe from evil, and to help humanity get a seat in the galatic goverment. The story is really good. There are a lot of plot twists, and points where you have to choose beween one character or another. You select the lines that you want Commander Shepard to say. You can be Paragon (pure good), Neutral, and Renegade (chaotic good). The choices you make ingame changes the story.
GAMEPLAY: Mass Effect is a real time RPG (role playing game). You level up your character, and you distribute your status points to your stats. The AI is very easy on lower difficulty, but on the higher settings they are pretty hard. The inventory screen is pretty disapointing. There are a ton of side quests to do, but most of them are the same map with a different skin. They can get boring after a while, but the main story missions are really to play.
GRAPHICS AND SOUND: The graphics in Mass Effect are very beautiful. It's the best the Xbox 360 has to offer. Every character is really well done, and the Terrain looks jaw-dropping good, but there are a lot of visual bugs like texture pop-in, and getting stuck in some objects (crouching will get you unstuck). The sound is really well done. The game has over 20,000 spoken lines, and the music is based of 80's sci-fi music.
BUY OR RENT? Buy. This is a game that you can not beat completely in one run. This is a game that you actually play 3 or 4 times, it's that fun.

Images copyright IGN.