Universe at War: Earth Assault (PC)

Universe at War: Earth Assault is this year's Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends. In other words, it's an attempt to deliver an old-school real-time strategy game that features three incredibly unique and distinct factions. And in that regard, Universe at War delivers because it does introduce three alien races, two of which feel like they haven't been seen before in RTS gaming. At the same time, Universe at War also sports some major flaws that hamper it quite a bit.

This is an alien invasion tale where, refreshingly, humanity takes a backseat. When a malevolent alien race known as the Hierarchy invades Earth to turn its inhabitants and belongings into raw material, all hope seems lost. Then, a crusading army of sentient machines called Novus arrives to battle the Hierarchy. Their fighting awakens a long-lost race that was hiding on Earth, the Masari. And, thus, the stage is set for an intergalactic war on Earth's surface.

The differences among the three factions are deep. The Novus build a network node that can encompass the map, which allows them to quickly shift forces around in the blink of an eye. The Hierarchy is like a destructive force of nature because their harvesters scour the map for raw materials while their lumbering walker war machines are like land battleships. Then there's the Masari, which might be the most conventional of the three because they center on the construction of a powerful base and defenses. However, the Masari have the most powerful and expensive units in the game. They can also alternate between two modes: light and dark. The former lets them move faster to inflict more damage, while the latter grounds all their air units to slow their enemies. When you drill down and get used to them, each faction has a lot to offer. For instance, if you're the Hierarchy, it's a lot of fun to just crush your enemies using walkers, but it's also fun watching those same walkers run headlong into your layered defenses if you're the Masari.

Universe at War's single-player campaign at first follows the traditional scripted campaigns of most RTS games. You begin as the Novus then move onto the Hierarchy as the game's tale of war and betrayal unfolds. When you pick up as the Masari in the third act, things change. Out goes the scripted storyline and in comes the global strategic metagame, which is like a big game of Risk. You decide which territory to invade next and then resolve the battles in real time. It's not a particularly deep strategic layer, but it does help shake up the formula a bit. When you're done with the campaign, there are various scenarios that let you play the global metagame different ways, or you can jump into regular skirmish mode against the system.

The game shines in the multiplayer realm, where a human opponent can exploit each faction's advantage to the maximum. The artificial intelligence in the single-player game can knock you around if you're not careful, but it generally doesn't vary tactics: a human does. Universe at War has the standard ranked and unranked skirmish modes that you'd expect; however, the game's most ambitious online feature is pretty neat. Conquer-the-world mode allows you to try to take over the world by yourself. You try to conquer the individual territories on the planet by battling someone in multiplayer. If you win, you seize that territory in your game. However, to partake in conquer the world, you have to have Games for Windows - Live Gold. This isn't an issue if you already have an Xbox Live Gold account and own an Xbox 360, but if you don't, then you'll have to pay up to become a Games for Windows - Live Gold member.

Universe at War suffers from some key issues. The most noticeable is the zoom level, which is almost nonexistent. If you can imagine playing a game with your face just inches from the screen, that's what Universe at War feels like at times. It's annoying to see a single Hierarchy walker fill up more than half the screen and realize that you can't pull the camera back any farther. It's such an artificial and painful limitation not being able to actually see the battlefield. The controls are also clumsy. If you try to click on a unit, at times, it won't register. Or if you try to double-click on a unit to select all of its type on the screen, it won't register at times.

Graphically, Universe at War has some pretty units, like the aforementioned walkers. They look almost organic in nature, with their glistening skin and bulbous curves. However, the rest of the game's visuals are a bit dated, from the blocky, polygonal look of many of the characters to the generally bland textures. The game does feature support for DirectX 10, but DX10 performance comes to an absolute crawl, even on a high-end PC that can run Crysis at maximum detail. This occurred even when all the graphical settings were dropped to the absolute lowest. Performance in DirectX 9, on the other hand, is excellent and smooth, even at the highest graphical settings. There's very little noticeable difference in image quality between the two.

Upon load, the game starts with a chilling and brutal cinematic scene that wouldn't be out of place in Spielberg's War of the Worlds movie. The scene shows human infantry brutally and mercilessly cut down by relentless, unstoppable alien war machines. Unfortunately, the tone of that scene is quickly lost because the game features corny dialogue that seems taken from a cartoon. The cigar-chewing human protagonist is all macho bravado. Meanwhile, the sentient machines of Novus sound like Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation trying to be cute, the Hierarchy leaders talk like they're dripping evil, and the Masari are haughty nobles. The music can be pretty engaging, but because each faction has its own distinct theme, the rest of the audio is also inconsistent. The background sound effects of civilians fleeing in terror are neat, until you realize they're the same for every single map. So whether you're battling in the Sahara or South America or Siberia, they all sound like Middle Americans.

Aside from the unique races, Universe at War doesn't really introduce anything new to the genre. If anything, this is a very traditional real-time strategy game in the vein of Command & Conquer. Given that Petroglyph was formed by many veterans of the original C&C, that's not too surprising. What's perplexing is that the game seems to miss a lot of the innovations that have rolled into the genre since C&C. These include newer concepts, such as the ability to zoom the camera back and see broad swaths of the battlefield. So while there's stuff to like in Universe at War, there's also stuff to dislike.

Rock Band (PS2)

Released last month on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, Rock Band was a revelation for rhythm game fans everywhere. By taking the concept laid down by Guitar Hero then multiplying it by a factor of drums and vocals, developer Harmonix essentially set the bar for multiplayer rhythm gaming. Now, Rock Band comes to the PlayStation 2, albeit without quite the wow factor of the previous iterations. The PS2 game includes the same collection of hardware as the last release, as well as the same core gameplay design. However, several key modes are missing--modes that made a big difference in the previous releases and are greatly missed in this one. By all accounts, Rock Band is still a lot of fun on the PS2--it's just nowhere near the ideal version of the experience.

Before we launch into the big recounting for the uninitiated of what Rock Band is, let's just quickly address exactly what the key changes in the PS2 version are for those just looking for differences. The main alteration was to the selection of game modes, of which there are decidedly fewer in this iteration. Online play of any sort has been taken out, along with the ability to download additional content. Not that the PS2 really has any reasonable way of storing downloadable content, but the game disc doesn't include any of the premium downloadable songs that have since been made available on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 either. Customization features are also absent, meaning you don't have the ability to create your own rocker. The game simply uses a smattering of default characters through each song, which is kind of a bummer because creating your own band members and customizing them as you pleased was a big draw of the experience.

Another big draw was the band world tour, the cooperative career mode. A version of that mode still exists here, but it's just a basic set list, à la Guitar Hero's career progression or Rock Band's single-player career. All the added elements, from traveling between venues and cities and earning stars and fans to eventually working your way into the hall of fame, are gone. At least there is some semblance of a way to play a career with your friends, but this version of it is a great deal less exciting.

As much as that all sucks, none of that robs the game of its greatest strength: its gameplay. In a sense, Rock Band is a little like three distinct games built into one. First, there's the guitar game, which lets you play approximately the same sort of game as Guitar Hero on guitar and bass, but with a few key differences. For one, the guitar itself is built quite differently from the Guitar Hero guitars. It's bigger, with a longer neck, and its body feels more solid. The fret buttons are larger, and are flush against the neck of the guitar, and there is a second set of narrower fret buttons all the way down the neck that you can tap on for solos. The guitar even comes with a built-in effects switcher, which puts effects like echo, flange, and wah-wah over the in-game guitar track.

The actual guitar gameplay isn't much different from Guitar Hero, with you strumming along and periodically tilting the guitar to engage "overdrive" (the game's equivalent of star power), but a couple of neat twists do add some flavor. For one thing, solos are given their own scoring section in each song, and the game tracks the percentage of notes hit during a solo. The higher the percentage, the higher the score bonus you get at the end of the solo.

The guitar game is of good quality, though a couple of things about it might drive a few longtime Guitar Hero fans batty. For one, the difficulty of the game is a good deal less challenging than what the hardcore Guitar Hero fan base is probably accustomed to at this point. The goal with Rock Band seems to be more about bringing in newcomers, so as a result, the difficulty level sits somewhere between Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero II overall. Not a bad thing if Guitar Hero III gave you conniption fits, but potentially less exciting for some of the hardcore guitar gamers out there. Also of note is that the note charts for guitar are handled a bit differently, with notes that can be pulled off via hammer-ons and pull-offs appearing as half-sized notes on the chart. It's not quite as easy to see these notes as in, say, Guitar Hero III, so you might end up screwing up a few solos until you get used to this new methodology.

Lastly is the guitar itself. It's a good guitar, but it does some things differently than the standard GH model guitars. The strummer doesn't click when you strum up or down, and the fret buttons seem a bit less forgiving in terms of timing in solos and other, tougher sections. It's not that it's bad or wrong--it's just different, and it takes some getting used to. Also, you're not going to get a ton of mileage out of things like the second set of buttons and the effects switch. Most people will probably forget the switch is even there until they accidentally turn on wah-wah, and sliding down to the second button set is a bit vexing to do just as you're about to head straight into a solo, since it takes a while to get accustomed both to the smaller buttons and to finding exactly where they are on the neck without staring at the guitar for a few seconds. Fake-guitar virtuosos will probably dig it, but most people will likely stick to the standard method.

Next there's the singing game, which closely emulates the mechanics of Karaoke Revolution and SingStar, but, again, with a couple of specific differences. You sing along as the lyrics display on the screen, trying to match your vocal pitch to the meter that moves up and down with the original vocal track. The key thing about singing is that the number of sections where a singer actually gets to do his or her thing is somewhat limited. But even those down moments aren't left for pure silence. Sometimes the vocal area of the screen will turn yellow, indicating for you to "make some noise," which then engages overdrive. There are also sections where you can simply tap the microphone to the rhythm of the song to get a tambourine or cowbell section going.

Beyond these wrinkles, the core of the vocal game design is to just sing, sing, sing...and occasionally rap. If there is any complaint to be made about the vocals, it's that it doesn't leave a lot of room for interpretation. On the higher difficulty settings, the game is extremely intent on you hitting the mapped pitches as closely as possible, even in situations where it seems like the mapped pitches aren't quite exact to what the original vocalist is doing. The same goes for the timing of each word. In some songs vocalists will trail off, but you can't really do that and still get the max score, which makes the vocals feel a bit robotic. Still, most vocal pieces are quite fun regardless, and in a nice touch to help middling vocalists everywhere, you can adjust the original vocal track volume via the controller as you play, so you can use it for as much or as little of a guide as you prefer.

Finally there are the drums, easily the most intense and enjoyable instrument of the bunch. The kit consists of a collection of four color-coded pads and a kick pedal, along with a pair of drum sticks. There's really no reference point for the drums portion of the game except for, well, real drums. You hit the pads in time as you would with a realistic drum kit, and on expert, the game practically maps out each song's drum part note for note. Make no mistake: When you are playing on expert, you are playing the drums. If you can do well on expert, you can probably pull out a decent beat on a real drum set at will. The good news for novices is that easy difficulty does a pretty good job of easing you into the act of drumming. The number of notes is much more limited, kick pedal usage is rare, and drum fills are eased back quite a bit.

Speaking of fills, one really cool thing about the drum portion of the game is that it allows for some improvisation. The way the drums handle overdrive is to give you some blocked-out sections where you can just bust out any kind of drum fill you want. The pads act as a snare, two tom-toms, and a crash cymbal. Go nuts, but just be sure you hit the last crash cymbal note at the end of the fill, at which point you will engage overdrive.

All of this hardware is of the same basic make and quality as in the previous versions of the game. In fact, the PS2 version actually comes with the exact same hardware that the PS3 version comes with, wireless guitar and all. So if you are planning on buying a PS3 at some point, you could get this version and then just buy the new game disc without rebuying hardware down the road. Because the game only comes with one guitar--and MTV/EA aren't selling separate guitars yet--you'll be pleased to know that if you already own a Guitar Hero guitar for the PS2, you can simply use that one.

You might be wondering exactly how reliable the hardware is, given the reports out about issues surrounding each of the different instruments in the initial run of the Xbox 360 and PS3 releases. Harmonix has come out and said that the initial run of instruments had some problems. However, it's swearing up and down that any hardware out on the market past the initial run should be problem free. For what it's worth, our hardware that came with the PS2 version of the game came out of the box unbroken across the board.

That covers all the technicals of the instrumental gameplay, but none of that quite emphasizes how excellent the game is at emulating the act of band play. By themselves, each instrument is basically fun, but when you get four people together playing at once, something spectacular emerges. Part of it is the way in which scoring has been designed for cooperative play. Overdrive can be turned on by anyone, but the more people you have in overdrive at once, the higher the score bonuses. By the same token, if one person in your band fails out of a song, another can simply engage overdrive (provided enough is stored up at that point) and come to the rescue, bringing the player back into the fold. But it goes beyond even the scoring mechanics. There's just something intangibly brilliant about the way having everyone play together feels. For instance, because the drums emulate the real-life instrument so closely, having a good drummer is paramount for success. If your drummer gets off beat, it can badly screw everyone up. Along the same lines, when your drummer is in a solid groove and the rest of the band is able to lock into that groove, the feeling that you're actually performing a song as opposed to simulating one is palpable, and it is quite the exhilarating feeling.

The game's song list goes a long way toward making that multiplayer even more enjoyable. Though the game includes only 45 licensed songs (along with 13 bonus tracks from lesser-known bands), many of these 45 are big-name tracks that are immediately recognizable and span multiple rock genres. Alternative rock fans will find such '90s delights as Weezer's "Say It Ain't So," Smashing Pumpkins' "Cherub Rock," and Nirvana's "In Bloom." Modern rockers will find The Killers' "When You Were Young," Foo Fighters' "Learn to Fly," and Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Maps." Classic rock fans will delight in being able to rock their way through Black Sabbath's "Paranoid," The Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter," and KISS's "Detroit Rock City." Other, less specifically denominational yet altogether awesome songs include The Ramones' "Blitzkrieg Bop," Rush's "Tom Sawyer," and Metallica's "Enter Sandman."

The vast majority of these songs are original tracks from the artists, with only a few covers scattered throughout the tracklist. Only a few of the covers really stick out much. The Geddy Lee on "Tom Sawyer" is a bit overblown, and the singer of Mountain's "Mississippi Queen" is a bit odd sounding as well. But by and large, the covers blend in nicely, and whoever did the vocals for Steven Tyler and Bruce Dickinson on the Aerosmith and Iron Maiden songs respectively deserve some kind of vocalist soundalike merit badge.

The only real problem with the tracklist is that some of the songs aren't the kind of immediately recognizable stuff you would expect in a game that's all about a bunch of people getting together and making elaborate band karaoke. Quick, off the top of your head, immediately think up the melody to The Police's "Next to You," or Molly Hatchet's "Flirtin' With Disaster." None of these songs are unpleasant to play or anything, but they don't quite fit into the scheme of songs anyone can just pick up and rock to, especially on vocals. Heck, just about anyone can probably whine their way through "Cherub Rock" or snarl through "Enter Sandman" on the lower difficulty levels. But Aerosmith's "Train Kept a Rollin'"? Maybe not so much, but perhaps that just depends on you and your friends' personal tastes in music.

In terms of the available feature set, we've already run down what the game doesn't include. You can play solo in quick play or in one of the three solo career modes: one for guitar, one for vocals, and one for drums. These all follow the basic formula laid down by Guitar Hero, with tiers that unlock in order of increasing difficulty. As mentioned previously, there is also the version of the band world tour, though again, it's just the same sort of progression as the single-player career mode. Additionally, there is a cooperative quick play mode, as well as a couple of competitive modes, such as a basic score duel (same instrument, same difficulty, play the entire song) and a tug-of-war mode (same instrument, any difficulty level, trade off sections of the song, try to win the crowd over to your side by performing the best). These modes are about as enjoyable as Guitar Hero III's multiplayer component (minus the online), so if you dug that, you'll definitely dig this stuff.

One of Rock Band's greatest strengths on the Xbox 360 and PS3 was its presentation, and a surprising amount of that presentational quality has made it to this version. The lack of character customization does make the game feel a great deal less dynamic, but the character modeling and animation still look great, and a lot of the visual filters the other versions had are on display here. Granted, it almost seems like the game is just running full-motion video of characters from the PS3 or 360 versions playing because the game uses a lot of the same band members over and over again. But either way, the background stuff still looks great, especially if you're running an HD display and playing with progressive scan turned on. If there's any flaw to be found in the visuals at all, it's that the notes on the note charts are a little on the small side. It's not a big deal in one- or two-player play, but when you have both guitars and drums going at once, it can sometimes be tough to make out whether you've hit a note or not. This is especially true of the PS2 version, where the note hits are even less definitively visible, especially with the drums.

In the end, it's a shame that the PS2 version of Rock Band can't quite measure up to the previous versions of the game, but it's still a lot of fun. The gameplay pops just about as well as it did on the 360 and PS3, and when playing with friends, the multiplayer experience is second to none. The only real issue here is the game's value proposition. It's $10 cheaper than the other versions of Rock Band, but given all the missing content, that difference in price ultimately doesn't add up to a better value. If all you have is a PS2 and you desperately want to play Rock Band, you'll still get a great game if you go this route. But if you have the choice, the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions rock much, much harder.

Medal of Honor: Airborne (PS3)

It seems you can't read a preview or review of a World War II-based FPS without hearing about how many games there are in the genre. With good reason, too--it's a crowded one. But just because there are a lot of them doesn't mean there can't be some good ones. Medal of Honor: Airborne is one such game. It starts off really slow, and the whole parachuting hook is little more than a gimmick; but later on the game realizes its potential and gets good.

There's not much of a story to Airborne. It's WWII; Nazis need killing and the world needs saving. You're in the Airborne division, so you'll be jumping out of planes and doing your part to swing the war in the Allies' favor. Before each mission you're given a brief rundown on what's going on and list of objectives to accomplish. Rather than spawning on the battlefield you'll arrive in style by parachuting out of a plane. As you fall to the ground you'll want to maneuver toward green smoke, which indicates a safe landing zone. In theory, parachuting into the level is supposed to open up a whole new style of play. You're free to land wherever you want, but invisible walls prevent you from getting too clever, and nine times out of 10, when you do land somewhere other than the safe zone you'll end up dead in a matter of seconds. There are some special landing zones to discover, and sometimes these areas will provide you with an advantageous starting point. But because you find most of these locations when you're already on the ground, they're of little use.

Once on the ground you'll take on waves of Axis soldiers over the course of the game's six levels. Six levels might not sound like a lot, but each generally takes an hour or more to complete, so it'll probably take most people around eight hours to finish the game. Your objectives are shown on your radar and you're free to tackle them in whatever order you choose. Between choosing your starting location and being able to pick what to take on first it might sound like there's a lot of freedom here, but there's really not--you can't start from many different places, and you have to do the same tasks regardless of the order you start them. Mission objectives range from blowing up AA guns to clearing buildings of enemy soldiers, taking out tanks, and detonating lots of explosives. On their own these tasks aren't anything unique, but because the levels are so long and feature so many objectives you often feel as though you're performing monumental feats rather than routine tasks.

The first three levels aren't very interesting. They're fairly linear, take place in unexciting settings, and don't play to the game's strengths. Starting with the fourth level the game picks up since you're given more freedom as to how you want to tackle the levels. You might decide to climb towers to take out snipers (their position is given away by a reflection off their scope), clear the area of ground troops, and then make your way into a building, while a different player might head to the building first, clear the ground troops second, and hide from the snipers rather than kill them. The game's artificial intelligence isn't very good, but at least it's aggressive. You can pick off guys as they peek around corners, but they won't just take it lying down. They'll spray bullets in your direction without looking, and they're rather fond of blindly tossing grenades over their backs. If you get too close or they get some reinforcements, enemy soldiers will charge right at you and inflict serious damage until you can fend them off with your weak melee attacks.

The controls are pretty standard for a first-person shooter. A sprint button comes in quite handy when trying to dash from one bit of cover to the next. Once you're behind that cover, the ability to lean and fire is extremely useful, as is the ability to raise your weapon and aim using its sights. As you progress through the game you'll be able to upgrade your weapons, earning bigger clips, faster reloads, and secondary firing abilities. You can carry two weapons at a time as well as a pistol, which isn't very powerful but has unlimited ammo. Grenades are often tough to come by, but ammunition is plentiful, as are health packs, which are scattered throughout the levels. It's a good thing, too, because once you start getting hit your health depletes in a hurry.

While most of Airborne is good, it does have its share of problems. Many of the automatic weapons have too much recoil, making them extremely difficult to aim--a problem not shared by the CPU, who is more than capable of hitting you from across the level regardless of the gun. Your fellow soldiers are sometimes quite useful, but other times they don't do anything at all--or worse, they stand right in front of you and block your shot. We also fell out of the level a few times, though this was usually when we parachuted someplace the game probably didn't want us to. When all of these problems come together the game can be extremely frustrating, as you're forced to try the same part of a level over and over again in an attempt to find the best way to circumvent the game's sometimes cheap tactics. One way in which the PS3 version has seen improvement over the Xbox 360 and PC versions is that it seems to take far fewer bullets to take down an enemy soldier on the PS3. It was really frustrating to empty a clip into someone only to have them shake it off like the Terminator, so it's good that this issue is fixed here.

Unlike the last Medal of Honor, MOH: Airborne has a solid online component. Up to 8 people can hop online and play ranked and unranked matches on half a dozen maps and a few different game types. The action's always fast-paced and for us, at least, lag-free. Interestingly enough, multiplayer is the one area where choosing where you want to parachute into a level actually lives up to the hype. As you descend you can see both friends and foes and, if you're quick enough, can land in areas that are quite advantageous--like right behind that jerk camping on a rooftop with a sniper rifle.

Airborne isn't a great-looking game, but except for a frequently terrible frame rate, the visuals don't hamper the experience. The frame rate wasn't an issue on the PC or Xbox 360, but the PS3 version will often come to a near standstill when the action gets hectic. Outside of a few nice-looking buildings, most structures are simple and look pretty much the same--not only to one another, but to every other WWII game out there. There are only a few different types of soldiers and while they aren't very detailed, you can tell one type from the next easily. At least, you can if you're up close. It's tough to tell the good guys from the bad guys when you're far apart, and it's even harder to hit them thanks to a lack of transition animation, meaning they might instantly jump from one position to the next. Weapons look great, but explosions look embarrassingly last-gen. Not only do weapons look nice, but they sound great, too. The rest of the game sounds pretty good as well. You'll hear the familiar orchestral theme from previous MOH games, and there's lots of chatter from both Axis and Allied soldiers.

Medal of Honor: Airborne is a game that rewards those who are patient enough to stick with it. The first half of the game is dull and just rehashes the same sort of gameplay you've seen countless times before. But about halfway through, things pick up and gradually get better and better until the last two levels, which are quite intense and a lot of fun to play. The multiplayer isn't anything groundbreaking, but it's quite good and adds some value to an otherwise short game. If you're tired of the genre, Airborne won't do anything to change your mind, but if you're looking to fight for the Allied cause yet again, it's a worthy tour of duty.

Assassin's Creed (Xbox360)

Assassin's Creed will stay with you long after you finish it. Here is one of the most unique gameworlds ever created: beautiful, memorable, and alive. Every crack and crevasse is filled with gorgeous, subtle details, from astounding visual flourishes to overheard cries for help. But it's more than just a world--it's a fun and exciting action game with a ton of stuff to do and places to explore, rounded out with silky-smooth controls and a complex story that will slowly grab you the more you play. Make no mistake: Assassin's Creed is one of the best efforts of the year and a must-own game for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 owners.

Not enough can be said about the living, breathing world that you'll inhabit in Assassin's Creed. As assassin extraordinaire Altaïr, you'll explore three major cities of the Holy Land in the 12th century: Jerusalem, Damascus, and Acre. Each city is beautifully rendered from top to bottom and features meticulously crafted towers that reach for the sky, bustling market squares, and quiet corners where citizens converse and drunks lie in wait to accost you. As you wander the streets (and rooftops), you'll push your way through crowds of women carrying jars on their heads, hear orators shout political and religious wisdom, and watch town guards harass innocent victims. Altaïr has a profound effect on this world, but the cities are entities all their own, with their own flows and personalities.

The visual design has a lot to do with how believably organic everything feels. The cities are absolutely huge, and though you don't get full exploration privileges in the first few chapters, they eventually open up to let you travel seamlessly from one side to another. Everything is beautifully lit with just the right amount of bloom effect, and almost everything casts a shadow, from tall pillars to Altaïr's cloak. In fact, sometimes the shadows get to be a bit much and may make you think for a moment that there is artifacting on your screen, when in fact it's a character's head casting a shadow on his or her own neck. Every object, from scaffolds to pottery, is textured so finely you feel as if you could reach out and touch it. Animations are almost as equally well done. Altaïr scales walls, leaps majestically from towers, and engages in swashbuckling swordfights that would make Errol Flynn proud. And he does it all with fluid ease, generally moving from one pose to another without a hitch. Minor characters move gracefully as well, though one of the game's few visual drawbacks is the occasional jerky animation on the part of a citizen. However, it's easy to forgive, considering that the cities are populated with thousands and thousands of individuals. In fact, these tiny blemishes are noticeable only because everything else looks so incredible.

What you hear is even more impressive than what you see. At the top of a temple, you hear little but the rush of wind, the twittering of birds, and the barking of a far-off dog. In the most populated areas, your ears will fill with the din of street vendors, the pleas of beggars, and the occasional humming. It's never too much, though, and the game does a good job of making sure you hear what you need to hear (for example, the cries of citizens who need your help), without filling your ears with pointless noise. All these effects, along with the clangs of swords and groans of assassinated foes, are outstanding. The voice acting of the supporting cast is similarly remarkable. Conversations are completely believable and delivered with the perfect amount of solemn dignity. Oddly, the weakest link is Altaïr himself. Actor Philip Shahbaz does an all right job, but he isn't up to par with the first-rate acting of his fellow troupe. Rounding it all out is a beautiful orchestral score that is most notable for its subtlety. Many of the game's most impressive moments are accompanied by lovely musical themes that add even more threads to the game's rich living tapestry.

Fortunately, the story that binds it all together rises to the occasion. Actually, there are two related stories in play. The unfolding drama of Crusades-era Palestine is a mere memory, forcibly pulled from a modern-day bartender named Desmond by a resolute researcher using a machine called an animus. The memories aren't Desmond's own--they are Altaïr's, stored safely in the hapless subject's genetic code. We follow Altaïr as he assassinates nine public figures at the command of his master, and as the common thread that ties these men comes into focus, so does the true identity of Desmond's captors. There are no cutscenes in the traditional sense; every bit of story exposition and dialogue flows smoothly from the gameplay and takes place entirely within the game engine. The ending is confusing, and it blatantly leaves open the possibility of a sequel, but it's a small blemish on an otherwise stirring tale. Altaïr's world is not one of absolutes. His assassination targets aren't always evil, and Altaïr isn't always likable. As he is fond of reminding us, "Nothing is true. Everything is permitted."

Of course, such an authentic world would be meaningless without a lot of fun things to do in it. Thankfully, Assassin's Creed is endlessly entertaining in that it features a fine mix of stealthy exploration, tight platforming, and exciting combat. To discover the whereabouts of your assassination targets, you must first follow up on possible leads. There are several different mission types in this regard. In some cases, you sit on a bench and listen in on secret conversations. At other times, you will closely follow someone carrying an important letter that you'll pickpocket. Alternately, you can beat the information out of your target. Most missions are relatively easy to pull off in the early stages of the game. But once the guards and townspeople start recognizing you (or you alert them to your presence too close to the scene of one of your crimes), they get a little tougher.

There are also some optional tasks, such as rescuing innocent townspeople from the clutches of guards. The reward for doing so is a group of vigilantes who will hang out in the area afterward and hinder any foes chasing you. It's also a good way to try out Assassin's Creed's combat, which is surprisingly satisfying, considering the game's focus on sneaking around. You can pounce on enemies using your hidden blade (an incredibly rewarding one-stab kill), or use throwing daggers to take enemies down from a distance. However, your sword is your melee mainstay, and though the hack-and-slash combat may seem simple at first, it gets more challenging once you unlock the various countermoves. Often, you'll have a dozen or more attackers to fend off at once, but though these fights can be a little tricky, you'll never feel as if you're in over your head. In fact, the few circumstances in which you are forced into combat--such as a late-game boss fight against a seemingly endless crowd of attackers and their leering leader--are challenging and require some pitch-perfect timing to counter every strike and lunge.

Nevertheless, brute force is rarely the best way to handle a situation. You want to slink unnoticed through the crowds, but you can draw attention to yourself in a number of ways--whether it be galloping past a guard station on a horse, knocking pottery off of someone's head, or getting so frustrated by the various beggars that you fling them away from you. (And trust us--these are the most aggressive panhandlers you'll ever meet.) If you antagonize the guards, they'll give chase. Yes, you can stick around and fight, and though it's never the easiest option, breaking stealth does not damn you to death like it does in other sneaking games. But why not lure them to a rooftop? Once up there, you can grab them and fling them to the street below. Or if there are too many of them, you can jump across the rooftops gracefully until you find a hiding place, such as a nice bale of hay or a curtained garden. Once you're hidden, they'll break chase and you'll be free to roam about.

You can also seek refuge in small groups of scholars who serve as mobile hiding places. It's a bit contrived to walk into a stationary cluster of scholars and have them suddenly start moving simply because you're there, but it gets the job done. Actually, if there's any drawback to the usually excellent gameplay, it's how synthetic certain elements feel. Vigilantes are always in the same spot, missions reset if you don't get them right the first time, and those same guards will be harrassing that citizen, an hour after you pass by. It's easy to forgive these quirks though, given the easygoing flow of the world surrounding these pockets of gameplay.

Climbing up buildings and jumping around the rooftops is fun and breezy, thanks to effortless controls that strike a great balance between ease of use and player input. You can leap across alleys and scale walls with the pull of a trigger and the press of a button, and though it's possible to launch yourself from a wall or hurtle through a vendor's booth by accident, these moments aren't very common. You'd think that a city specifically designed to let you climb structures and caper about the roofs would look overly artificial, yet there's never a moment when you will think to yourself, "Wow, that looks like a place where I'm supposed to jump." The architecture looks completely natural, which makes Altaïr's abilities all the more exciting to pull off. The environments don't look as if they were created for him to climb around on; he just uses the hand he's been dealt, as any good assassin should.

In Assassin's Creed, the greatest joy comes from the smallest details, and for every nerve-racking battle, there's a quiet moment that cuts to the game's heart and soul. Climbing towers to uncover portions of the map is a simple mechanic but forever satisfying, thanks to the beautiful vistas and soft musical themes that accompany the view. Even the drunks that pester you are amusing and fun, though their constant shoving is more than annoying, especially if you are trying to pickpocket a pedestrian or eliminate a target without a fuss. It all makes your missions that much more compelling, and you'll be inclined to explore every nook and cranny and take on every optional task, just for the fun of it. There's a ton of stuff to do, and even when you've exhausted your official tasks, you can search for the collectible flags and crosses strewn around the cities and countryside. You could probably plow through the main quest in 20 hours if you're lucky, but completists might spend close to 50 hours finishing every quest and gathering every collectible.

There are few differences between the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions. PS3 owners are blessed with a slightly more solid frame rate, although the 360 version features a little more contrast in the lighting, so it's pretty much a wash. But regardless of which platform you go with, you'll have an amazing and unforgettable game. Assassin's Creed is the kind of game you tell your friends about, and one that should be in your collection.

Crysis (PC)

It was hard not to be completely impressed when the first images and videos of Crysis appeared about 18 months ago. Scenes of lush jungles and towering alien war machines looked light-years beyond what seemed possible. Of course, the two questions that revolved around Crysis since its announcement were whether it would deliver on those visuals and whether it would deliver a game worthy of those fancy graphics. It turns out that the answer to both those questions is a resounding yes, as Germany's Crytek has proven that its 2004 hit Far Cry was no fluke. In fact, it was just the beginning from this studio. With its sophomore effort, Crytek has managed to deliver an incredibly advanced and exciting first-person shooter that practically rewrites the rules for the entire genre.

Crysis is an alien invasion game set in the year 2020. An archeological team on a remote Pacific island is captured by an invasion force of North Koreans, and your US Special Forces team is dispatched to investigate and rescue the scientists. Clad in high-tech nanosuits capable of boosting your strength, speed, and armor, as well as cloaking you temporarily to the enemy, you're parachuted into a tropical paradise that's crawling with intelligent enemies and something else that's tearing both the North Koreans and US forces to shreds.

Like Far Cry, the first half of Crysis is essentially a "sandbox" game where you're put in the middle of incredibly large levels and tasked with an objective. How you get the job done is pretty much entirely up to you, which is part of the brilliance of the game's design. For instance, the environments are big enough to give you a wide range of latitude. Do you have to get to a certain point on the map? You can take a meandering route that avoids patrols and go stealthy, or try the up-front approach and try to blast your way through, with the danger of enemy reinforcements showing up. Need to infiltrate a North Korean-held village? You can try the front gate, or maybe explore and find a quieter way in.

Couple these huge environments with the powers of the nanosuit, and you have a ton more options. You can play like the eponymous character from the movie Predator and use your cloaking abilities to stalk North Korean patrols, picking them off one by one and watching the survivors react in confusion. That could be via a silenced rifle, or simply coming up from behind a guard and grabbing him by the throat and hurling him off a cliff, or through the roof of a building, or against a tree, or whatever catches your fancy. Enhanced speed and strength give you an amazing amount of mobility, so you can vault atop buildings and come down behind someone, or run up against a North Korean vehicle next to a cliff and push it over the side. In a heartbeat you can switch between different roles, from stealthy assassin to seemingly unstoppable death dealer. It's a game that makes you feel like a superhero, though not an invincible one, because you simply can't run roughshod over the enemy. Crysis rewards smart, fast thinking.

It helps that the game features a high degree of advanced physics and destructibility in a highly dynamic world. Getting caught in a firefight in the jungle is a cinematic treat, thanks to the way the bullets will chop down trees, while branches sway from impacts. This isn't just a visual effect, either, as falling timber can kill if it lands on someone. There's all sorts of emergent behavior like that throughout the game, events that spring up completely unintended or unforeseen. In one instance, the flaming wreckage of a chopper landed on a hut, crushing it and killing all those inside.

Meanwhile, the gunplay and ballistics modeling make this shooter feel as if you're handling real weapons. Trying to hit a target at long engagement ranges is challenging thanks to weapon recoil and other factors. The North Koreans are encased in body armor, so they take some time to gun down, unless you aim for the head, which usually puts them on the ground. At your disposal is a variety of firearms, like shotguns and assault rifles. One of the neat aspects of the game is that you can fix up your weapons on the fly, adding scopes, silencers, and grenade launchers, provided you've found them. There are trade-offs for each add-on. Silencers let you take down guys quietly, though they reduce bullet damage, meaning you've got to make every shot count. Or flashlights mounted on your weapons might help you out in dark levels, but will give you away.

Crysis gives you all of these toys and ratchets the action higher and higher the deeper you get into it. The first level of the game introduces you to the sandbox combat and the nanosuit. From then on, the battles become larger and more intense as the action escalates. You'll storm North Korean-held villages and bases; encounter their counter to your nanosuit; take part in a chaotic assault on a North Korean harbor; and from there the game accelerates. Next is a wild tank battle in a tropical mountain valley, with helicopters and jet fighters roaring overhead. There's a sheer rush as your tank plows through vegetation and knocks down trees as missiles and tank fire erupt all around you. Meanwhile, the vehicle explosions are convincing, right down to the way ammunition cooks off and sends spirals of smoke outward. It's visual poetry of destruction. You're not confined to your tank the entire time, either. You can jump out at any time and use your suit powers and rifle to take on enemy infantry. When they're dead, pick up their dropped rocket launchers and engage vehicles in a cat-and-mouse-style game.

As events in the game continue to ramp up, you'll find yourself inside the alien ship, the zero-gravity environment delivers a visually strange and yet wondrous setting. As you navigate through the environment and engage the aliens you have to figure out your way through the level. Escape the alien ship and you're tossed into a frozen environment against the alien foe. After the alien vessel, the game becomes less free form and more linear, but it also amps up the action along the way, reflecting the way that the stakes are being raised. Now you're trying to fight your way out of the alien sphere, which means dodging war machines that look like something from The Matrix. There are a few more surprises in store from that point before you get to the ultimate showdown.

The one criticism that can be leveled on the story is that it leaves you screaming for more. While there's an adrenaline-packed finale, you still don't want the game to end on the note that it does. The single-player campaign is around eight to 10 hours long, which is a healthy amount for a shooter. There's a lot of replay here, too, as you can experiment with a multitude of different approaches. Plus, it's fun to go back and try out the large, set-piece battles again and again, since they can unfold in different ways thanks to the dynamic nature of the combat and the artificial intelligence.

Speaking of which, the AI is generally excellent in a fight, as enemy soldiers use cover and concealment effectively. They also know how to lay down suppressing fire and are great at tossing grenades to flush you out of hiding. Getting in a firefight in the jungle with these guys is always fun, because they'll make you work for it at the default normal difficulty setting. (However, the AI can suffer from the same problem all shooters seem to have; mainly that bad guys sometimes don't know what's going on down the road from them.) When you take damage, find cover and your armor and health will regenerate. If you die, you reload to the last checkpoint or quick save. Meanwhile, Crysis includes a special hard mode called delta, which is a lot of fun, because rather than making the game tougher by cheating and giving the bad guys more powerful weapons, delta takes away some of the gameplay crutches that help you at lower difficulty levels. For instance, incoming grenades are no longer highlighted, so you've got to pay attention now, and your health regeneration is slower. And the best part about delta is that all enemy soldiers speak fully in Korean, so unless you understand Korean, you're going to have a much harder time trying to figure out what they're planning to do.

The single-player game is a considerable accomplishment by itself, but Crytek has also included a full-featured multiplayer mode called power struggle that combines the best of the Battlefield games and Counter-Strike. The goal in power struggle is that each 16-man team (for 32 players total) must destroy the opposing team's base, but to do so they have to construct alien weaponry at a central prototype facility. To power the prototype facility, though, both teams need to seize and hold power stations throughout the map. In addition, there are bunkers and factories that can be captured; capturing a bunker allows your team to spawn in forward positions, while capturing a factory allows you to purchase vehicles that can help your side. Whenever you help your team by killing the enemy or seizing an objective, you gain points that can be used to purchase more advanced weapons, vehicles, and gear. It's an excellent multiplayer mode, and it comes with five large maps to support it. Keep in mind that everyone has their suit powers as well, so in addition to all the running and gunning and vehicle driving, there's plenty of leaping and speed running and cloaking going on.

Then there's instant action, which is essentially deathmatch with nanosuit powers. This is a chaotic mode set in some stunning levels, including what feels like a fully modeled Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. You can run around the flight deck, a good chunk of the hanger deck, and many of the corridors. Weapons are strewn about everywhere in instant action, so it's just a crazy melee of shotguns, snipers, rocket launchers, or nanosuit-enhanced fists. However, a team deathmatch mode is missing, which seems odd. Team deathmatch would have been a welcome addition, since it would have instilled some kind of teamwork into an otherwise free-for-all frenzy. Finally, Crysis multiplayer features built-in voice support, which means that all you need is a microphone to talk to your fellow players and teammates in power struggle.

Graphically, Crysis looks photorealistic at times--it's that amazing. Crytek has managed to achieve a visual fidelity that blows away anything seen to date, and there are countless moments when you'll just stop and gape at what you're seeing. Sometimes it's just the ordinary, like the setting sun casting all sorts of shadows and rays through the jungle canopy. Other times, it's something epic, like watching a huge alien war machine stomping toward you. The impressive aspect of the graphics is just how it manages to render huge, open, dynamic, interactive levels. Everything looks amazing up close or far away. Interacting with your squadmates lets you gaze upon the mechanical sinews of their nanosuit, or the incredible facial animation that brings them to life. They're capable of the subtlest of facial gestures to help convey emotion. Then you can sit on a ridge and peer down using binoculars to a village a kilometer away, scouting the location of the patrolling guards and machine gun posts. The sheer fact that many of the trees and buildings are destructible just adds a level of realism that's staggering.

You'll need a fairly high-end system to make the game look its best. In that regard, Crysis really does embody everything that's both exciting and daunting about PC gaming. A dual-core CPU and the latest generation of video card can run the game at maximum detail settings capably, though you have to lower the resolution a bit to do so. It's doubtful that a system has been built yet that can run the game at ultra-high resolutions with all the graphical sliders maxed out. Dial down the detail settings to high, which is the next-lower setting, and Crysis still blows contemporary games out of the water. Results are a bit mixed at medium and low settings, though. At the lowest detail settings, objects pop in and out with a fair degree of consistency. It's annoying at best and frustrating at worst, as it can impact gameplay. Crysis does support both DirectX 9 and DirectX 10, though the latter requires you run the game using Windows Vista. The visuals in DX9 are impressive, but they really come to life in DX10, provided you have the hardware.

The game also sounds fantastic, from the primordial "moans" that the island periodically releases, the soft crunch of dirt and branches under your feet, and all the background sounds that you'd expect in the middle of the jungle. Turn on your suit's cloak, and everything sounds muffled. The music, by composer Inon Zur, feels inspired by the scores from epic Hollywood action movies, while the voice acting is also excellent, helping to deliver some distinct characters and even a little humor.

If you put it all together, Crysis is just remarkable. This is a game that pushes the envelope in terms of both technology and gameplay and does so with aplomb. Crysis raises the expectations for every shooter to follow when it comes to graphics, interactivity, environments, immersiveness, AI, and gameplay. Quite simply, Crysis represents the first-person shooter at its finest, most evolved form.

Soldier of Fortune: Payback (PS3)

If you've ever wondered what happened to the Soldier of Fortune franchise, you're not alone. The first two Soldier of Fortune games were popular shooters in their day, blending fun single-player and multiplayer gameplay with the concept of playing as a mercenary. But after 2002's Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix, the franchise seemed to fall off the face of the planet. Unfortunately, it should have stayed missing in action because the series has been resurrected with Soldier of Fortune: Payback, a shooter that embraces all the wrong lessons that have been learned over the past decade.

At first glance, Payback looks like a very pretty game. The visuals aren't cutting-edge, but there's an attractive quality to them, from the lavish depth-of-field blur effects that kick in whenever you reload your weapon to the lush lighting. You no longer play as John Mullins, the hero of the first two games, but rather as a new mercenary caught up in a very cliché and badly told tale of a worldwide terrorist organization that's so clever it brands all of its operatives with the very same tattoo on their necks. It's a wonder they're so difficult to find.

However, it all goes downhill quickly because Payback reveals itself to be a relentlessly linear and highly scripted shooter with a lot of flaws. Perhaps the most frustrating of these deals with the fact that the game relies on a checkpoint save system with no ability to quicksave, which means that if you're killed, you have to restart from the last checkpoint. That wouldn't be so much of an issue if those checkpoints were frequent and numerous, but they're not. Thus, much of the game's six to eight hours of gameplay is spent trying and retrying to get through the many sections of the game. Though there's a regenerating health system, you still die all too easily. It's not uncommon to have to replay a section a dozen times or more before you finally beat it.

The artificial intelligence is bad and consists mainly of two scripted actions. Once triggered, a bad guy will either run straight at you or stand in the open and shoot at you. There's no sense of dynamic behavior in the way the AI reacts to what you do. The weapon modeling is nonexistent; there's practically zero recoil on any of the weapons, even the light machine guns. On the flip side, even though the weapons all feel incredibly lightweight, they do a ridiculous amount of damage. The first Soldier of Fortune games were "edgy" in that you could practically dismember opponents with gunfire. The same goes for Payback, though it looks like the developers just copied and pasted the same code from the earlier games because the visual effect is almost exactly the same. Arms, legs, and heads all get shot off with absurd regularity while blood gushes everywhere. (The game does boast a low violence option that tones down this carnage.)

The music is actually pretty catchy, but the rest of the audio is lacking. The sound effects all seem canned, and the voice acting is terrible. The script certainly doesn't help either because the dialogue would be fitting for a straight-to-VHS action movie. The game also ends in a silly cliffhanger that assumes that gamers are going to want more of this action.

Additionally, Payback's multiplayer is very generic, with such modes as deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture the flag. There's a whopping five multiplayer maps total, so there's not a lot of variety there either, which is also disappointing, considering Soldier of Fortune II's popular and fun multiplayer mode.

The PC game is slightly less expensive than major titles, but the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games are full priced. Nevertheless, they're all a terrible value proposition considering the sheer quantity and high quality of shooters this year. Unless you like pain and frustration, there's simply no reason to play Soldier of Fortune: Payback when there are so many other better games on the market.

Rock Band (Xbox360)

Rock Band is every wannabe musician's dream. A game that takes the four key instruments one needs to make a band a rock band (guitar, bass, drums, vocals), and builds a highly playable and intensely addictive game around them. To a degree, developer Harmonix got a head start on the process of creating Rock Band when it developed the first two Guitar Hero games, but whereas those games were all about the decidedly solo act of severe simulated shredding, Rock Band goes in an entirely different direction. The solo play has taken a backseat to cooperative multiplayer. This game is all about the act of performance as a band, getting a group of four people together and working together to get the highest score bonuses possible as a group, all while fake guitaring and realistically singing and drumming your way through more than 40 different licensed rock hits. The steep $170 price tag for the game and bundled hardware might prove to be a barrier for entry for some, and in addition, the hardware itself comes with a few flaws. But if you're willing to make the investment, Rock Band is a guaranteed good time for any music lover, and one of the best party games you'll ever play.

In a sense, Rock Band is a little like three distinct games built into one. First, there's the guitar game, which lets you play approximately the same sort of game as Guitar Hero on guitar and bass, but with a few key differences. For one, the guitar itself is built quite differently from the Guitar Hero guitars. It's bigger, with a longer neck, and its body feels more solid. The fret buttons are larger, and are flush against the neck of the guitar, and there is a second set of narrower fret buttons all the way down the neck that you can tap on for solos. The guitar even comes with a built-in effects switcher, which puts effects like echo, flange, and wah-wah over the in-game guitar track. The only difference between guitars in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of the game is the fact that people who buy the 360 version get a wired guitar, whereas PS3 owners get a wireless one. On the flip side, PS3 owners don't get a USB hub to connect all the instruments to, whereas 360 owners do. That shouldn't be an issue if you have an older PS3, but if you have a newer one with the two USB ports, you'll need to buy one of those hubs separately. It's also worth noting that you only get one guitar with the bundle on either platform, but if you own a Guitar Hero guitar for the 360, you can use it with the 360 version of Rock Band.

The actual guitar gameplay isn't much different from Guitar Hero, with you strumming along and periodically tilting the guitar to engage "overdrive" (the game's equivalent of star power), but a couple of neat twists do add some flavor. For one thing, solos are given their own scoring section in each song, and the game tracks the percentage of notes hit during a solo. The higher the percentage, the higher the score bonus you get at the end of the solo.

The guitar game is of good quality, though a couple of things about it might drive a few longtime Guitar Hero fans batty. For one, the difficulty of the game is a good deal less challenging than what the hardcore Guitar Hero fan base is probably accustomed to at this point. The goal with Rock Band seems to be more about bringing in newcomers, so as a result, the difficulty level sits somewhere between Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero II overall. Not a bad thing if Guitar Hero III gave you conniption fits, but potentially less exciting for some of the hardcore guitar gamers out there. Also of note is that the note charts for guitar are handled a bit differently, with notes that can be pulled off via hammer-ons and pull-offs appearing as half-sized notes on the chart. It's not quite as easy to see these notes as in, say, Guitar Hero III, so you might end up screwing up a few solos until you get used to this new methodology.

Lastly is the guitar itself. It's a good guitar, but it does some things differently than the standard GH model guitars. The strummer doesn't click when you strum up or down, and the fret buttons seem a bit less forgiving in terms of timing in solos and other, tougher sections. It's not that it's bad or wrong--it's just different, and it takes some getting used to. Also, you're not going to get a ton of mileage out of things like the second set of buttons and the effects switch. Most people will probably forget the switch is even there until they accidentally turn on wah-wah, and sliding down to the second button set is a bit vexing to do just as you're about to head straight into a solo, since it takes a while to get accustomed both to the smaller buttons and to finding exactly where they are on the neck without staring at the guitar for a few seconds. Fake-guitar virtuosos will probably dig it, but most people will likely stick to the standard method.

Next there's the singing game, which closely emulates the mechanics of Karaoke Revolution and SingStar, but, again, with a couple of specific differences. You sing along as the lyrics display on the screen, trying to match your vocal pitch to the meter that moves up and down with the original vocal track. The key thing about singing is that the number of sections where a singer actually gets to do his or her thing is somewhat limited. But even those down moments aren't left for pure silence. Sometimes the vocal area of the screen will turn yellow, indicating for you to "make some noise," which then engages overdrive. There are also sections where you can simply tap the microphone to the rhythm of the song to get a tambourine or cowbell section going.

Beyond these wrinkles, the core of the vocal game design is to just sing, sing, sing...and occasionally rap. If there is any complaint to be made about the vocals, it's that it doesn't leave a lot of room for interpretation. On the higher difficulty settings, the game is extremely intent on you hitting the mapped pitches as closely as possible, even in situations where it seems like the mapped pitches aren't quite exact to what the original vocalist is doing. The same goes for the timing of each word. In some songs vocalists will trail off, but you can't really do that and still get the max score, which makes the vocals feel a bit robotic. Still, most vocal pieces are quite fun regardless, and in a nice touch to help middling vocalists everywhere, you can adjust the original vocal track volume via the controller as you play, so you can use it for as much or as little of a guide as you prefer.

Finally there are the drums, easily the most intense and enjoyable instrument of the bunch. The kit consists of a collection of four color-coded pads and a kick pedal, along with a pair of drum sticks. There's really no reference point for the drums portion of the game except for, well, real drums. You hit the pads in time as you would with a realistic drum kit, and on expert, the game practically maps out each song's drum part note for note. Make no mistake: When you are playing on expert, you are playing the drums. If you can do well on expert, you can probably pull out a decent beat on a real drum set at will. The good news for novices is that easy difficulty does a pretty good job of easing you into the act of drumming. The number of notes is much more limited, kick pedal usage is rare, and drum fills are eased back quite a bit.

Speaking of fills, one really cool thing about the drum portion of the game is that it allows for some improvisation. The way the drums handle overdrive is to give you some blocked-out sections where you can just bust out any kind of drum fill you want. The pads act as a snare, two tom-toms, and a crash cymbal. Go nuts, but just be sure you hit the last crash cymbal note at the end of the fill, at which point you will engage overdrive.

If there is any issue to be taken with the game's hardware, it's its reliability. For instance, one of our pre-release kick pedals from the drum kit, which is made up of a somewhat thin piece of plastic hooked into a spring underneath it, actually snapped in half during a particularly heated rendition of The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again." The other pedals we used for testing held up despite some extreme thrashing, but all the same, our suggestion is that if you've got a Mr. Heavyfoot in your band, tell them to go shoeless and ease up on the pedal slammage a smidge. Another issue is the USB microphone. One of our retail boxes came with a broken mic that cut in and out and wouldn't register our vocals properly. Any supported USB headset mic will apparently work in a pinch on the PS3, and the standard Xbox 360 headset works on there as well, but regardless, that's still a concerning issue. At least EA seems to be aware of potential hardware issues, as a big flyer inside the box explains the 60 day hardware warranty that comes with the game and directs you to an EA Web site. You might want to keep that URL handy if you run into any issues.

Those are all the technicals of the instrumental gameplay, but none of that quite emphasizes how excellent the game is at emulating the act of band play. By themselves, each instrument is basically fun, but when you get four people together playing at once, something spectacular emerges. Part of it is the way in which scoring has been designed for cooperative play. Overdrive can be turned on by anyone, but the more people you have in overdrive at once, the higher the score bonuses. By the same token, if one person in your band fails out of a song, another can simply engage overdrive (provided enough is stored up at that point) and come to the rescue, bringing the player back into the fold. But it goes beyond even the scoring mechanics. There's just something intangibly brilliant about the way having everyone play together feels. For instance, because the drums emulate the real-life instrument so closely, having a good drummer is paramount for success. If your drummer gets off beat, it can badly screw everyone up. Along the same lines, when your drummer is in a solid groove and the rest of the band is able to lock into that groove, the feeling that you're actually performing a song as opposed to simulating one is palpable, and it is quite the exhilarating feeling.

The game's song list goes a long way toward making that multiplayer even more enjoyable. Though the game includes only 45 licensed songs (along with 13 bonus tracks from lesser-known bands), many of these 45 are big-name tracks that are immediately recognizable and span multiple rock genres. Alternative rock fans will find such '90s delights as Weezer's "Say It Ain't So," Smashing Pumpkins' "Cherub Rock," and Nirvana's "In Bloom." Modern rockers will find The Killers' "When You Were Young," Foo Fighters' "Learn to Fly," and Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Maps." Classic rock fans will delight in being able to rock their way through Black Sabbath's "Paranoid," The Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter," and KISS's "Detroit Rock City." Other, less specifically denominational yet altogether awesome songs include The Ramones' "Blitzkrieg Bop," Rush's "Tom Sawyer," and Metallica's "Enter Sandman."

The vast majority of these songs are original tracks from the artists, with only a few covers scattered throughout the tracklist. Only a few of the covers really stick out much. The Geddy Lee on "Tom Sawyer" is a bit overblown, and the singer of Mountain's "Mississippi Queen" is a bit odd sounding as well. But by and large, the covers blend in nicely, and whoever did the vocals for Steven Tyler and Bruce Dickinson on the Aerosmith and Iron Maiden songs respectively deserve some kind of vocalist soundalike merit badge.

The only real problem with the tracklist is that some of the songs aren't the kind of immediately recognizable stuff you would expect in a game that's all about a bunch of people getting together and making elaborate band karaoke. Quick, off the top of your head, immediately think up the melody to The Police's "Next to You," or Molly Hatchet's "Flirtin' With Disaster." None of these songs are unpleasant to play or anything, but they don't quite fit into the scheme of songs anyone can just pick up and rock to, especially on vocals. Heck, just about anyone can probably whine their way through "Cherub Rock" or snarl through "Enter Sandman" on the lower difficulty levels. But Aerosmith's "Train Kept a Rollin'"? Maybe not so much, but perhaps that just depends on you and your friends' personal tastes in music.

Clearly Rock Band's focus and ultimate strength is as a multiplayer game, specifically a cooperative one. This is also evidenced by the game's somewhat less captivating single-player element, at least compared with its multiplayer game. You can play solo in quick play, or in one of the three solo career modes, one for guitar, one for vocals, and one for drums. These all follow the basic formula laid down by Guitar Hero, with tiers that unlock in order of increasing difficulty. One nice thing is that each instrument's career offers a totally different track order, scaled to the difficulty for that specific instrument. The other cool thing is the fact that you can customize your own rocker for each instrument. You start out with some basic edits, and then as you go, the cash you earn in the career mode lets you buy all sorts of wicked rock garb, tattoos, haircuts, and the like. But as far as the progression of the career itself is concerned, it's pretty boilerplate. Nothing of note really happens during the course of the career, and it ultimately lacks the dynamism of the band world tour mode.

Band world tour is the co-op career mode. Two to four players can create their own rockers and start rocking right away, and band members can jump in or drop out at any time, so long as the profile of the band founder is always signed in and playing. The mode is essentially a much more fleshed-out version of the same sort of tiered career mode as the solo tour. You start out as a nobody band, playing the teensiest club in your hometown. As you play gigs and perform well, you'll earn more fans, which helps propel your band ever forward toward rock stardom. You also earn stars in each gig, and the more stars you collect, the more gigs that will unlock in each available city.

This mode is, in a word, addictive. Working to gather as many fans and stars as you can becomes almost compulsive after a while. If you've got friends with you willing to stick it out, you could potentially lose a lot of hours of your life touring the world. Another thing that makes band world tour so cool is the presentation of it all. As you grow your fan base, you'll earn the opportunity to get a crappy van, then a tour bus, and even a jet. You'll have the chance to win another band's roadies, hire a sound guy, get signed to a label, and eventually work your way into the hall of fame. It's an awesome experience, to be sure.

The mode itself never actually ends, letting you continue to earn fans and keep playing gigs, though after a while you will forced into the higher difficulty settings, which potentially spells trouble if you start running into songs you don't really know yet, and you eventually start to run into a fair amount of song repetition, especially if you haven't already unlocked all the game's songs in the solo tour. Starting out fresh guarantees you'll be playing a lot of the same songs again and again from the very beginning. If you unlock everything in solo, the tour opens up a great deal. While 58 songs might seem like a lot to pick from, you're still going to end up repeating songs a fair amount, especially when you do the special challenges, which automatically pick random songs for you.

It is perhaps a good thing, then, that Rock Band is supported with lots of downloadable content. Several song packs (including artist packs for bands like Queens of the Stone Age and Metallica), single-song downloads, and full-album downloads (The Who's "Who's Next" will be the first) have been announced thus far. Pricing on these songs is slightly cheaper than the Guitar Hero song packs, but not so much cheaper that you won't notice the hurt on your wallet if you start splurging for every song that comes along. Still, the idea of getting regular downloadable content is great (Harmonix and MTV are apparently going to start out by releasing songs on a weekly schedule), and the full-album download idea is awesome. Even better, any song you download makes its way into the rotation in the band world tour, which should alleviate some of the repetition over the long haul.

The one truly unfortunate thing about the band world tour mode is that it isn't online. That might be a dicey prospect for those without regularly available friends with a similar love of music games. The good news is that there is an online co-op quick play option, so if you and your buddies just want to get together and play single songs as a band for fun and high scores, you can. The online also includes competitive options, such as a basic score duel (same instrument, same difficulty, play the entire song) and a tug-of-war mode (same instrument, any difficulty level, trade off sections of the song, try to win the crowd over to your side by performing the best). These modes are about as enjoyable as Guitar Hero III's online component, so if you dug that stuff, you'll definitely dig this. The online modes also performed well across the board, with no noticeable lag while playing.

Perhaps one of the best things about Rock Band is its presentation. The in-game visuals are of very high quality, with great character modeling, top-notch animation work on each musician, and lots of neat lighting and visual effects during the course of the performance. And the best thing about all of that? None of it causes the game to slow down whatsoever. The note charts stay steady no matter how much craziness is going on in the background. If there's any flaw to be found in the visuals at all, it's that the notes on the note charts are a little on the small side. It's not a big deal in one- or two-player play, but when you have both guitars and drums going at once, it can sometimes be tough to make out whether you've hit a note or not. Also, if you're trying to figure out which version of the game to get, visuals won't make much difference. Both the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the game look pretty much identical to one another.

The presentational quality goes well beyond the visuals. Everything about Rock Band just feels authentic. It's the little details, like how some arenas will put your band's name in big lights behind you on stage, or how when you're performing well the crowd will start singing along with the vocalist. Awesome stuff. Heck, even the game's loading screens are cool, offering up some neat band trivia, as well as dynamically generated band photos featuring your created musicians in a variety of delightfully exaggerated rock poses.

All told, Rock Band turns in an absolutely stellar performance. And much like any real band worth its salt, it's not just because of one or two things that it does well while the rest fall by the wayside. Each individual component of the game is good on its own, but it's when you put those things together into a collective whole that the game truly shines. Ultimately, the $170 investment is bound to be a sticking point for some, especially those who don't have readily available friends who can come over and rock whenever the itch needs to be scratched. But even with that caveat in mind, Rock Band is easily one of the most ambitious music games ever produced, and that it is so successful in its ambition makes it something really special.

Unreal Tournament 3 (PC)

Unreal Tournament 3 probably shouldn't feel as fresh and as exciting as it does. When you get down to it, UT3 doesn't change a lot of the things that you liked about Unreal Tournament 2004. It's still the same fast-moving and action-oriented first-person shooter. Yet the game's new maps, the requisite graphical overhaul, and easy-to-understand gameplay modes all feel great. The way the shooter genre has changed over the three years since the previous game is also a factor. With most other games slowing things down and going for a more realistic, militaristic pace, UT3's hypercharged gameplay explodes out of the gate feeling refreshing and new.

The UT games have never been about single-player action, but like in the previous games, there is a campaign mode in UT3. It's a series of matches against bots wrapped around a basic but uneventful storyline. The big switch this time around is that Unreal Tournament is no longer a sport. Now it's war, and you play as a character on the hunt for revenge against an evil Necris woman who led an assault against unarmed civilians on your colony. You and the survivors of the attack join up with a corporation, fight to gain territory held by other corporations, and so on. It's little more than a five- to seven-hour training mode to help you get up to speed on the maps and the modes so you can go into multiplayer with a fighting chance. One cool addition is that you can play the campaign mode online with up to three other players. Although joining other humans to combat the artificial-intelligence-controlled bots isn't exactly the most fun you can have in this game, it's more compelling (and easier) when you're playing with other people. You can set the skill level of the bots, too. At the lowest setting, they're complete idiots that won't even bother to turn around and fight you if you start shooting them from behind. The highest setting, godlike, is appropriately stiff, though not entirely impossible. It's just tough to fight against opponents who rarely miss.

The maps you'll see in the single-player campaign are the same maps you'll see online, at least until the mod-making scene shifts into high gear. You'll get into matches using a typical PC-style server browser, but the game tries to keep you away from a full list of every server running by moving you through some console-game-style menus to filter down to the gametype you want to see. UT3 comes with six different modes of play. Deathmatch is the standard free-for-all battle. Team deathmatch, as you'd expect, breaks you up into two teams. Duel is a one-on-one mode where two players go at it while other players spectate. All three of these modes are played on the same set of deathmatch-friendly maps. UT3 also has a standard capture-the-flag mode, complete with the translocator, the teleporter gun that has made UT's take on CTF stand apart from most others. There's a new vehicle CTF mode, which takes the standard CTF concept and places it onto larger battlefields. As the name suggests, you have a number of vehicles that you can use toward your goal of grabbing the opposing team's flag and getting it back to your base. The largest mode is called warfare, and like onslaught mode before it, it's played on even bigger maps, with more vehicles.

Warfare is a node-based mode where each team has a base with a power core that needs to be damaged and destroyed for a victor to be declared. The power core is linked to other nodes at various spots in the map. You must push forward, capture nodes, and link them together until you've got your team's nodes linked to the opposing team's base. At that point, you can damage the enemy core and, ideally, blow up it for a victory. There's a ton of pushing and shoving back and forth across the map when two great teams square off, and it's also the most strategic mode. It differs from onslaught mode by offering secondary objectives, like unlinked nodes that can be captured to give a team forward spawn points and access to more vehicles and a countdown node that will occasionally drain energy from the enemy core if you control it. Each of the objective-based team modes comes with its own set of maps.

Overall, the map quality is high, with plenty of symmetrical, interesting level layouts for the objective-based modes. One deathmatch map, called Gateway, has multiple areas that look really different, all of which are linked together with portals. You'll also get a new remake of the classic Unreal map Deck. Furthermore, the Unreal mod community has always been pretty rabid, so you know it's just a matter of time before someone makes one of those "giant world" levels where you can hide in a sink drain and snipe people with an instagib shock rifle while they float down into the bottom of a bathtub. Yes, that's right, the instagib mode is also back in the game, along with a handful of other basic mutators you can use to make quick changes to any of the modes.

The weapons in Unreal Tournament 3 should be old hat to anyone familiar with the series. The shield gun has been ditched in favor of the impact hammer, and your default weapon is the slow-firing enforcer pistol, but beyond that, the weapon differences feel limited to minor balance changes. The bio rifle's gooey projectiles seem to do more damage, which makes it somewhat more useful. The secondary fire on the flak cannon seems as if it flies out at a slightly higher, slower arc, which forces you to make a few changes to how you aim. But again, the changes are minor. The rocket launcher can still lock on, the sniper rifle is still great fun for headshots, and the redeemer is still a huge missile that you can guide into targets to cause a nice, big blast that's handy in some of the larger vehicle CTF games. But when isn't a large explosion handy?

The other gameplay changes also feel relatively minor. Recent UT games have employed an adrenaline counter, which built up as you killed enemies or collected large pills around each level. When the meter was full, you could activate a special ability, such as invisibility or regeneration. This system isn't present in UT3. Also, the rules for double-jumping after a dodge move seem to have been altered a bit. Again, these are minor differences that don't really get in the way or drastically change the overall feel of the game, but they're noteworthy just the same. A more dramatic difference is the hoverboard, which is in vehicle CTF and warfare. The hoverboard lets you pick up a little more speed, which is useful on the larger battlefields. The catch is that getting hit while on your board knocks you over, which gives enemies more than enough time to finish you off as your character slowly arises from the ground. You can even do tricks while on the board, which isn't useful for gameplay purposes but is still totally rad.

Unreal Tournament 3 uses Unreal Engine 3, the same basic set of tools that powered Gears of War. As such, this is a really great-looking game on high-end machines. But even if your PC isn't top of the line, the game scales better than most, giving you a playable experience on midrange machines as well. But, of course, the game is at its best when you're exceeding the game's minimum requirements, in situations where you can run at a high resolution and still get a great frame rate. It supports widescreen resolutions, but playing in widescreen actually gives you a smaller view of the overall action, given that the game appears to cut off the top and bottom of the 4:3 view to fit it onto a wider monitor. UT3 certainly isn't the first PC game to have this problem, but given its highly competitive nature, cutting off parts of the screen seems to be a pretty bad solution.

The game's textures, character models, and animation are all top-notch when you've got everything turned up. Characters can be tweaked and modified using different torso pieces, shoulder plates, and more. The handful of levels that have running liquids in them have good-looking water effects, too. Overall, it's a very sharp-looking game if your machine can hang with its higher settings. The audio fits right in with what you'd expect a UT game to sound like. The music is high in energy, the explosions and gunfire sound great, and the character voices, which occasionally pipe up to taunt you when you get killed, fit right in as well. The announcer is appropriately loud and booming when calling off your head shots, killing sprees, and the like.

It's a very basic, straightforward package, but don't take that to mean that UT3 is a no-frills sequel. With its variety of modes and its occasionally crazy high-speed action, UT3 still feels very different than the typical first-person shooter coming out these days. On top of that, it's very exciting and just as much fun now as it has been in previous installments. UT3 has more than enough content to keep you busy, and with mod-making tools included in the package, the potential for more user-generated content in the future is certainly present.

Mass Effect (Xbox360)

Developer BioWare has always been at the forefront of progressive storytelling in games, so it's no surprise that Mass Effect's story is one of its best yet. It's got a unique take on the chase-the-bad-guy-across-the-universe plot, and just when you think you've got everything figured out, the game throws you yet another surprise. BioWare has created a politically charged universe with an exhaustive backstory and filled it with a bunch of interesting, multifaceted characters. Combined with an exciting and unique combat mechanic, it makes for a fun and absorbing experience that you'll want to see through to the end, just to see how everything turns out--even if the game isn't perfect by any means. In fact, it's surprising that so many small annoyances and glitches made their way into a game of such general high quality. Still, most players will be able to look past them and enjoy Mass Effect for what it is: A terrific role-playing game with great production values and fun, exciting action.

As in most role-playing games of this nature, you begin by customizing an avatar. You play as Commander Shepard, potential savior of the galaxy, but there's plenty of room to mold him or her as you see fit. Physical customization isn't as deep as you'll find in something like last year's Oblivion, but the system is relatively robust, letting you choose from a variety of preset features, and even letting you round everything off with a scar. Shouldn't every badass commander have one? Of course, you'll also choose a class. In this case, you've got six to choose from, each with various strengths in combat, tech, and biotics (Mass Effect's sci-fi equivalent of magic). More impressively, you will select a few autobiographical tidbits--and these choices aren't just for show. Through the course of the game, characters will refer to your past, and your resulting dialogue options will allow you to react to their comments with various degrees of humility, wistfulness, and scorn.

The narrative is pure space opera, yet there's no denying that BioWare has created a tale of surprising depth and appeal. Surprise number one: Humanity is not the political center of the universe. We don't have a seat on the galactic council, or even a representative on the Spectre squad, an elite group of special forces whose members are given wide berth to solve political and military challenges as they see fit. In the meantime, a Spectre has gone rogue, ransacking ancient artifacts and unleashing the violent, robotic Geth race on an unsuspecting galaxy. As Shepard, you pursue him across the Milky Way, visiting one alien world after another and discovering the fallen Spectre's intentions along the way. He isn't the best villain ever created: He disappears for the bulk of the game, which makes finding him feel less urgent than it should. Still, the journey to the game's exciting end is one worth taking.

In true BioWare fashion, you'll be navigating through loads of dialogue trees throughout the game, and how you respond can have life-or-death consequences--though you shouldn't take that to mean that you need to brood over every decision. Oftentimes, multiple choices have the same result, a somewhat transparent trick that makes it seem as though you have a lot more impact on the conversation than you really do. At important junctures, however, your decisions can affect how missions play out. You can turn friend to foe, console (or devastate) a suicide-attack victim, or exploit evil corporate executives for fun and profit. And it all plays out amid an intricate melodrama of political intrigue and racial prejudice, and in a galaxy populated by fascinating, complex characters. There are pages ripped from the Star Wars and Star Trek playbooks, certainly, but quirks such as the interesting speech patterns of the overly-formal Hanar alien race, or the nomadic structure of the Quarian flotilla--a galactic government that's always on the move--make Mass Effect's version of the Milky Way a unique one.

When navigating dialogue, you'll also be earning paragon or renegade points, which is the usual light-versus-dark system we've come to expect from the developer. Unlike in Knights of the Old Republic, however, your decisions here will not affect any abilities you have. However, the intricate relationship between the story and the game proper means that these decisions still affect gameplay--though that effect is usually an indirect one. More interestingly, your paragon and renegade meters are separate, rather than being at opposite sides of a single spectrum. It's a subtle but effective choice that lends itself to Mass Effect's shades-of-gray fiction, where light and dark aren't mutually exclusive.

The main quest starts you on a huge space station called the Citadel, but takes you across a small series of planets before reaching the game's exciting final moments. Not that you're stuck with the main story, since you can pick up a good number of side quests along the way. Some of them are simple and relatively self-contained, while others will send you across the galaxy to uncivilized planets and derelict spaceships. This involves bringing up your galactic map, selecting a destination system, and going planetside to kick some alien butt. There are multiple regions to choose from, and often multiple solar systems within them, but while that sounds intimidating, it's not nearly as mind-bogglingly huge as you would expect. In any given system, you can usually only land on one planet--and on each of these planets, there are usually only a few things to do before you get to your destination. More surprisingly, once you've finished the mission, there's never a reason to return. Aside from the annoying thresher maws (more on these later), there aren't any hostile indigenous creatures, so once you've dispatched your foes and scavenged for loot, it's time to move on.

When you first land on a planet, you drive around in a rover called the Mako. The thing's possibly the most resilient vehicle ever created in a game. You get dropped onto the surface from hundreds of feet in the air and drive up impossibly steep mountains without much difficulty. Too bad that the driving portions are undoubtedly the weakest of the game. The weird bouncy nature of the rover and the fact that gravity is the same on every world (even Earth's own moon) are both suspect issues, though they don't really affect gameplay.

The rocky planetary design and Mako combat mechanics can really be a downer when combined together. You can spray machine gun fire or launch shells at your foes, and it works fine, provided you are on the same level as your enemies. However, the Mako's turret, for whatever reason, can't move up or down. The result is that bullets don't necessarily land where your crosshair is, so if you're on higher terrain or your target is too close, those endless clips you're unloading are useless (though you can hit enemies above you without difficulty). It's sometimes maddening, since in many situations, the enemy base is nestled below you in a crevasse, and you're forced to either get in closer (often a death sentence in an area swarming with tough foes like the robotic Geth colossi), or get out and try to take on the toughest foes of the game on foot. Be careful if you get out of the Mako in areas like these though, since your adventuring party can slide into a deep valley and get stuck very easily, which forces you to either return to the Normandy (your ship) and return to the planet, or reload a saved game.

The other issue here is with the aforementioned thresher maws, which are sandworm-like beings that burst from the ground, spew deadly goo at you, submerge, and emerge elsewhere. These encounters can be really exciting, since the things are tough to take down and keep you on the move. The problem is that the game doesn't check on the Mako's position before respawning the thresher maw. Multiple times, we had the creature emerge from directly underneath us, which either resulted in an unavoidable insta-kill or getting stuck in the thresher's geometry while the camera jittered madly. That's just not fun, and you will find yourself avoiding flat expanses on planets just to avoid these problems.

Thankfully, on-foot combat is a lot of fun. You'll accumulate six total teammates, two of whom can accompany you on missions at any given time. They have a variety of talents, and each of them is special in his or her own way. There's a variety of guns to choose from, from pistols to shotguns to assault rifles, and each weapon can be outfitted with various upgrades that may increase stability, add scanners that bypass disrupted enemy radar, and more. You can also outfit special ammunition, though you always have unlimited ammo.

On top of that, some characters have magic-like powers called biotics to mess with. It's worth noting, however, that these powers are focused on manipulation rather than direct offense. You can push enemies back with the throw power (awesome to behold at higher levels), lift them in the air, or create a vortex that sucks enemies toward it (another great use of Mass Effect's fun combat physics). Engineers have some nice abilities as well, such as the ability to sabotage weapons from a distance, which makes your enemy's weapon explode, or the power to turn robotic enemies against your own foes. As a rule, your teammates aren't a liability, though they aren't governed by the most advanced artificial intelligence we've ever seen. But provided you micromanage them as described below, you'll not only be getting the most out of the experience, you won't be apt to notice any drawbacks to the AI.

The combat feels like it belongs in a third-person shooter at first, but if you continually approach it this way, you'll die. A lot. Like in many previous BioWare RPGs, you're meant to pause, survey the situation, and perform your actions. As long as you stick to that method, you'll find combat to be a lot easier than it first appears. You can set your party members to automate their actions, simply perform defensive powers on their own (the better choice), or only perform powers on your command. Holding the right bumper brings up the command wheel, which lets you assign orders to your companions, as well as perform your own abilities. You can also take cover behind walls or other objects, though this mechanic isn't all that helpful. Once you get into the groove, battles are rather enjoyable, with a flurry of bullets and biotic powers flying around. The joy of flinging the Geth around, filling them with shotgun shells, and watching them drop from the ceiling after lifting them in the air is a joy few RPGs can approximate.

The spoils of battle are always a fun reward for a job well done, and loot ramps up pretty well. You can also open up various lockers and containers for more loot, though it's best to level one of your party members in the decryption skill for the more difficult-to-open ones. To open locked containers, you have two equally odd choices: Either perform a minigame that resembles the overdone contextual button presses we've seen in far too many games of late, or smear omnigel on the container, which is an all-purpose goo that opens cabinets, repairs the Mako, and, we suspect, may also eliminate ring-around-the-collar. It sounds like a silly mechanic, but all things considered, it's a perfectly legitimate way of keeping the user engaged in the looting process, and it makes you feel like you earned the resulting spoils.

As you can imagine, you'll be doing a lot of fiddling with your inventory, what with all these weapons, upgrades, and party members to deal with, but this is another stumbling block that could have used some streamlining. The menu interface isn't terrible, though on its own, it's a bit clunky. But it's the little things that add up in a game that requires you to spend so much time in menu screens. First annoyance: In some menu screens, you can't hit a button simply to escape to the previous menu. For example, in the weapons upgrade menu, if you decide you don't want to make any changes, you can't just leave the menu--you have to choose something, even if it means scrolling to the top of the list and selecting the same upgrade you already had equipped. In other cases, such as when you convert an item to omnigel, the menu jumps back to the top of the list, which is vexing. You can't even deselect a power from the ability wheel in combat once you've chosen one. You can change the skill, but on the frequent occasion where you will want to change your mind after selection and not cast one at all, you're stuck wasting a skill and waiting for it to recharge.

Other problems rear their heads as well, such as the occasions when you or your party members get trapped on level geometry, which forces you to reload your last save. But you'll be apt to forgive them in light of the depth and variety to be found here. It's fun to get to know your crew, conduct a clandestine romance, or turn Shepard into a hard-line exclusionary (or a racially sensitive diplomat). You could finish a fairly complete play-through in 40 hours--standard for a role-playing game--but there's enough contextual content to make it worth a second play, if only to explore your renegade side, try out other romance options, or see another of the multiple endings. On the other hand, if you ignored the side quests and stuck with just the main storyline, you could be done in 15 hours or less.

Mass Effect's visuals are excellent. Facial animations are among the best in gaming: Characters move their lips believably with the dialogue, further expressing themselves with subtle tilts of the head or with a slight raise of the eyebrows. Character models are beautifully detailed, such as with your Krogan teammate Wrex, whose every wrinkle and ridge is carefully textured and molded. There are some technical hitches, however. The framerate can dramatically dip at the worst possible times, and there is a lot of texture pop-in. There are also frequent load times--some of them hidden by elevator rides, others popping up in the midst of exploration. Nevertheless, Mass Effect looks wonderful. From an artistic perspective, the game looks great, if not quite original. Planet outposts tend to use only one of two interior layouts, and environments owe a lot to games and films of the past (much of the game's look wouldn't be out of place in a Halo title). But even with the obvious inspirations, Mass Effect still conveys its vision clearly, thanks to meticulous character designs and dramatic set pieces, such as the Citadel itself.

It's also one of the best-acted games in recent memory. An all-star cast including such well-known actors as Fred Tatasciore and Seth Green bring Mass Effect's characters to brilliant life. Not once will a drab line delivery or overzealous histrionics get in the way of your immersion. The soundtrack is evocative, with just the right amount of sci-fi shimmering to round out the occasional symphonic swelling. Sound effects are great across the board, from the robotic yammering of the Geth to the din of a planetary blizzard filling the room with its high-powered whooshing.

All told, Mass Effect is a great game with moments of brilliance and a number of small but significant obstacles that hold it back from reaching its true potential. But in the end, if you like RPGs and want to spend some time in an absorbing sci-world populated with a bunch of unique inhabitants, you'll definitely have plenty of fun with this one.