Mass Effect

Mass Effect is BioWare's space opera built on a radical idea: that your choices should follow you across an entire trilogy. Playing Commander Shepard, you recruit a crew, navigate interstellar politics, and make decisions that carry forward from one game into the next, accumulating into a personal version of a galaxy-spanning war.

The original three games, each thick with downloadable story expansions, form the spine of the series, and their branching relationships and morally loaded choices set a template much of the genre still chases. The universe also extended into an animated film, though the core games remain the heart of it.

Its reputation rests on character. You come to know the crew well enough that the trilogy's hardest choices genuinely sting, which is exactly what BioWare was reaching for.

The Mass Effect franchise spans 22 games, 1 films, 1 music in the CrossBinge catalog.