Mass Effect 2 Review

Mass Effect 2 is a superior game to its predecessor and Bioware should be given credit for fixing the majority of the serious issues with the original. More importantly, they made some key overhauls that not only better the game, but make it different from the first Mass Effect, so you are not playing the same game with different characters or story. Due to me being uncreative, here are some bullet lists.

THE GOOD

• Primary shooter/secondary RPG. This is the biggest change between the two Mass Effects. The first was an RPG first and a shooter second. This relegated the combat to underdevelopment. It looked great in previews and test runs, but seemed around halfway there when released. Fortunately Bioware looked at this and took the steps to fix it. Mass Effect 2 now plays fully like the 3rd-person cover shooter made popular by Gears of War. The cover system has been improved from its near-unusable state in Mass Effect to the key component of combat. Unlike the first game, you cannot just run straight into enemies and mow them down. Careful management of cover is required to survive and the controls to use it work well. The way ammunition works is different too. Formerly, weapons had unlimited ammo but had an overheat gauge. This was a decent idea but fell apart when you realized ammo management was unnecessary. Now weapons do use ammo, but they all use a single type that enemies will drop. While this seems like the new false front, it makes sense because of the six possible class types for your character and their limitations on what weapons they can use. Specific ammo types would create the details that Mass Effect 2 sheds. Building on this, the micromanagement of equipment has been removed. You will only upgrade to different weapons in the same class (like getting a different assault rifle or shotgun from the one you currently have) a few times, and the new one is always better. Instead, weapons as a type can be upgraded for your whole squad and you can change up your armor but not the armor of your squad. I'll discuss why I think this might be a little too much later, but overall I feel like the emphasis on squad combat while still keeping the RPG elements that worked best (the dialogue wheel, exploration, and tech/biotic abilities) makes Mass Effect a well-balanced and stronger product.
• The AI of your companions seems improved in combat. I only have one trip through the game under my belt, but the improvement is so exceptional I am assuming it is constant. Your teammates will usually move to cover if they are being attacked and often move up and use different angles intelligently. This is opposed to Mass Effect, where the common strategy was to run into the middle of the area and take fire from every enemy until death. The friendly AI actually is friendly now, instead of a nuisance you have to manage so they cannot screw you over.
• The environmental design has expanded. The game areas are now varied graphically and the level design is different in every area. Mass Effect suffered from two or three standard level layouts and designs that were monotonous mere hours into the game.
• The graphics look excellent and avoid the old technical hiccups. This point is a good compliment to the new level sections. Really the graphics follow more from the original, which looked nice at the time. Faces in particular are vastly more detailed and well-animated. The framerate holds steady and most importantly the ridiculous texture pop-in from the first game is gone. To be fair, it is present in some instances, but it is hardly noticeable and resolves in a second or less, opposed to the beginning of conversations being marred by it in the original.
  
• The side quests have been fleshed out more. Specifically, each of your squad's "spotlight" missions have received a big upgrade and carry significant consequences depending on how they play out. Various interactive scenes replace the skeleton combat scenario with maybe a choice at the end. Particular highlights include an interrogation, working from within an assassination, and trying to tempt someone from out of hiding and trap them in a nightclub.
  
• It is plain cool to play a game where choices you made in a previous game directly affect everything. Relationship choices, life/death choices, and how you treated the world in general can show up. Fortunately this is somewhat restrained, as you are not given constant updates or appearances from every character or old quest you did, which would feel over-the-top and not befitting the huge universe.
• They took out the MAKO. If you've never played Mass Effect, count yourself lucky you missed this. The MAKO was a six-wheeled vehicle that you drove around in during several story missions and in general anytime you dropped from space onto a planet. It had some weapons and often you were tasked with killing enemies while in it. Unfortunately it was badly developed, out of place within the traditional framework, and frustrating as hell to control. Oh, and if you flipped it, your whole party died. It does not matter that this rarely happened, because it happened to everyone at least once, which is ridiculous. It might be hard to understand how annoying it was unless you played the game, but trust me: it being gone is a Martha Stewart-esque good thing.

THE MIDDLE

• The story. I never thought Mass Effect's story was anything great, but it got the job done and Mass Effect 2 is the same. There are some serious curves thrown in throughout the opening, but they mostly fade away quickly without discussion. It also suffers from being the middle piece of a trilogy, as you cannot shake the feeling that everything you do is just setup for Mass Effect 3. Still, story has never been the chief goal of these games. Instead, prominence is given to extensive world-building with your ability to shape its outcome through your choices that exist in a now-perpetual world. While saying everything else is window dressing is an overstatement, it still is partially true.
• Voice-acting. Some of it is great and some not so much. The male voice for Shepard is still...off. Sometimes the lines come across as terribly overplayed and laugh-eliciting at the wrong moments. Some of that is due to the dialogue, which is overall solid but can still produce some real clunkers. Whoever voiced Zaeed and Mordin are the standouts. The former is basically Boba Fett with lines and the latter is an alien genius geneticist that speaks in rapid-fire minuscule sentences and fragments as he outlines seemingly everything running through his mind at every second.
  

THE BAD

• Resource gathering. Even though they canned the MAKO, this seems like its equally annoying replacement and not in the spirit of the new direction at all. In Mass Effect 2, you purchase upgrades for your ship, your squad, and your weapons by using quantities of four minerals. While you can find varying small amounts of them on missions, the main way to get them is by scanning planets and launching resource nodes. The problem is you need a considerable amount of all four to maximize your upgrades, and this takes hours of time. Basically, you go into a planet's orbit and start scanning by holding the left trigger and moving it around the surface. You have a gauge that will react whenever minerals are detected and then you can send out a probe that collects it. The whole process is time-consuming and boring as hell. Later you can acquire an upgrade that allows you to scan faster, but it is still a pain. It takes you out of the action and the story, but you have to do it to progress in the game. Certainly this is not something that should prevent you from playing the game, but it still grates, and seems like something that would have been in Mass Effect, with its much more varied options for equipment.
  
• Fuel. This sort of relates to resource gathering. Now, in certain parts of star systems, you must purchase fuel in able to move between points. What I fail to get is why only in certain parts and not everywhere. When you jump into new systems you do not need it, nor when you move around in interior clusters or nebula's. You only use it when you move between the clusters, nebula's, or other interior areas of systems. Fuel is thankfully not expensive and can be purchased in most systems at fuel depots, but I cannot understand why you only use it intermittently. In the big picture, this hardly detracts from the game, but it seems misplaced in the stripped down setup.
• Cinematic conversations. Now here is a good idea that went awry. The dialogue wheel was such a revelation in Mass Effect that Bioware could be forgiven for making the conversations always between two people that never moved and always stood a foot apart. So now they tried to step up their game and make everything the word I hate to use but which seems most appropriate: "cinematic." The characters will now move around during dialogue and sometimes interact with the environment. This works well for a little while, until you realize there are around four stock expressions and movements anyone will do. You can only watch Shepard crack his knuckles, clench his fist, and my personal favorite, cross his arms across his chest and assume the ultimate suspicious power stance, so many times before it gets irritating. Also stuck on repeat are instances in conversation where a character will get up and move around or examine something during a certain line and then will do the exact same movement with the same angle after they return to their previous position again and again. It gets unintentionally hilarious fast. Good try, and if Mass Effect 2 is any indication at fixing things that need to be, Bioware should get this under control next time.
  
• No customization is no fun. So earlier I said the less customization was an improvement, but on a smaller scale I think they might have taken too much out. While there was an overabundance of equipment in the first game, that mostly stemmed from the game giving you access to it too much, making ninety percent of it pointless. It was still interesting looking through the different manufacturers and mixing equipment with strengths for different characters that had vastly different abilities. That's totally gone in Mass Effect 2. The image of your characters never changes outside of few and far between weapon switches. The characters themselves have had their number of individual powers you can level reduced and the powers are more common among each member. It is certainly not bad enough that every character plays the same, but there has been a significant melding of the vastly different character classes from Mass Effect into two or three simple archetypes. This is certainly a subjective point, as the game is more streamlined for these changes, but I think it removes too much variety as a cost.

• The helmet glitch. Okay, here is something incredibly minor to finish up and affects nothing. The game does not recognize when your character is wearing a helmet. Since you keep your armor on constantly unless on your ship, this can create some hilarious moments. Watch in amazement as you take a drink straight through a visor and try not to fall out of your chair when your emotional embrace with your previous love leads her to assault your helmet with her tongue.

So there you go. I'm surprised I actually finished this. I probably left out half of the important things and am wrong about what I did talk about, but what are you going to do?