Mass Effect is an action role-playing game (RPG) developed by the same team that created the highly acclaimed Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

You play as Commander Shepherd, a bright young space marine upon whose shoulders rests a rather heavy weight: the prospect of galactic peace.

The game plays a neat balancing act throughout, remaining challenging and intriguing while ensuring that nothing is ever difficult enough to arrest the flow of the genuinely interesting plot.

As well as the main story campaign, there are dozens of unconnected planets to visit, side quests to tackle and relationships to explore. Suffice to say, you’ll be playing this one for quite a while.

Many casual gamers are put off by the complexity of RPGs but, right from the get-go, Mass Effect can be as simple or as intricate as you want it to be.

You can custom-build your own hero – male or female – or just settle with the default character if you’d prefer to get stuck in quickly. Likewise, you can closely monitor and develop individual attributes as your character gains experience points or simply choose to level up automatically. Perhaps the best example of balance is the gameplay itself: Mass Effect is almost equal parts RPG and action shooter, which makes for an extremely playable combination.

Though not connected in any way to the Star Wars universe, Mass Effect clearly owes a lot to it. The ships, technology and weapons all bear a distinct similarity to their equivalents in George Lucas’ space opera (though there’s no lightsaber, sadly), while the telekinetic Force-style powers displayed by certain character classes and the backdrop of interstellar political intrigue feel like they’re lifted almost directly from the Skywalker saga.

None of that particularly matters, given the breadth of the Star Wars influence. But we would say that if you’ve already played Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect occasionally feels like the same game but without the official Lucasfilm branding. That shouldn’t put you off, though. Mass Effect is a high-quality PC RPG, and one that seems to have suffered very little – if anything – in translation from the original Xbox version.