Mass Effect 2

You'll gladly trade hours of your life to Mass Effect 2. There's just so much here to experience, and it's all uniformly excellent in execution. BioWare has delivered on its promise to let us affect this massive world through our actions, and you can bet that we'll be playing this one through several times in anticipation of how it all pans out.

Games like Mass Effect 2 don't come around often enough. Look at any aspect and you can be sure it's great. It's incredibly personal while still retaining a sense of epic sweeping scale. The combat and mission design are outstanding. The visuals, voice acting, soundtrack, and direction are miles ahead of the competition. Perhaps most impressively, Mass Effect 2 manages to fulfill its incredible ambition while only suffering from very few technical hiccups.

Mass Effect 2 is an incredibly ambitious game, and most developers would've balked at the idea of a sequel to a Triple-A blockbuster that fixed every error, dotted every i and crossed every t - but Bioware have succeeded. It's a testament to their dedication and hard work, a testament to Bioware's status as one of the most important developers today, and a testament to what the RPG genre can still do. It's an awe-inspiring, cinematic, moving and deeply personal choice-driven epic – and likely to stand out in the future as one of the most important RPGs this generation.