Mass Effect and Heavy Rain were two titles that came out tops at the British Academy Video Games Awards (BAFTA) recently held in London.

Heavy Rain walked away with three BAFTAs, for Original Music, Technical Innovation and Story. Mass Effect was crowned Best Game, applauded for being a “combined achievement of technology, art, design [and] audio… a beautiful complete gaming experience.”

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood claimed the BAFTA for Action, with its “exhilarating chases [and] heart-thumping shadowing missions” highlighted. Meanwhile Civilization V won the BAFTA for Strategy, a second BAFTA for the series with Civilization Revolutions taking the prize in 2009.

Controller free gaming also featured at the awards with Kinect Sports winning the Family BAFTA. Super Mario Galaxy 2 won the Gameplay BAFTA, interesting to note that the original game walked away with Best Game in 2009.

The Handheld BAFTA went to Cut the Rope, a physics-based puzzle game that recorded over one million sales just nine days after it was released. My Empire, “a Greco-themed city-building game playable by Facebook” won the new Social Network Game category.

F1 2010 took top honours for the Sports BAFTA while Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit won the Multiplayer award. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 took home the Use of Audio BAFTA while God of War III claimed the Artistic Achievement award. This marks the third win for the series which won two BAFTAs in 2007. The Ones to Watch Award was awarded to TWANG! designed by That Game Studio.

The Fellowship, the highest award that the Academy can bestow was presented to Peter Molyneux (Dungeon Keeper, Fable and Populous) by Sir Ben Kingsley. The GAME Award of 2010, which is the only award at the ceremony voted for by the public, was awarded to Call of Duty: Black Ops which scored 110 000 votes. This marks the third year that the Call of Duty franchise has won this award.