Mass Effect 2

System: PC
Release Date: 2010
Published By: EA
Reviewed by: Darien
Rating:

Bioware is an amazingly frustrating company. They have a wonderful gift for making really fun games, but, for whatever reason, they always load lots of tedious, unfun bullshit in there too. Is that just to bring the standard down so they're off the hook if they release a stinker like Dragon Age: Origins?

Now let's be clear. I know, I know. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking I'm carping on the game for having too many cutscenes, aren't you? Admit it. You were thinking that. Well, I'm not. Mass Effect 2 does have a lot of cutscenes, but almost all of them are skippable if you want, and they're really good in any event. There's a lot of talky-man nonsense if you're in to that, but it never seems to be so thick you can't find anything to shoot through it. No, what I'm talking about is the damn minigames.

You know me. Always bitching about minigames. Hey, if they were any good, I wouldn't. Like all games, Mass Effect 2 has lockpicking / hacking minigames, and they are crap and you do them a thousand times. At least they're super easy, and seem somewhat related to the subject matter this time around; you're not just play Frogger for no discernible reason. Worse than those by far, however, is the utterly inane planet-scanning minigame. This minigame has no gameplay. Literally. You hold the right mouse button, and you move the mouse around and wait for the damn meter to beep. Then you left-click and watch a little animation. Then you do it again and again and again. For fucking hours. Bioware, why do you hate your audience so? Why do you force us to go through this mind-numbing length-of-play padding bullshit?

At least the dune buggy's gone. If you get the DLC, there's even a place you can go where you can see the dune buggy impaled on a big damn spike. Warms my heart, it does. In place of the dune buggy, you have actual gameplay! Doing random missions in the galaxy is no longer a matter of landing on a featureless, empty world, driving the buggy around for days, and then fighting through an identical prefab building. Now all the sidequest missions are actually properly designed, and they're set in real levels with actual objectives. It's a welcome change, and it makes the game concept seem a lot more fulfilled.

The game now plays as a series of "mission" levels; the open, explorable environments from the first game are gone. Instead, there are more straightforward, corridor-y levels that lead to a goal, and which you cannot revisit or reexplore afterward. This gives the overall effect of reducing the game's RPG feel; there are only four worlds you can land on when you don't have a mission there, and each of them is a fairly small area with only a few mobs. There's nothing like the complexity of the Citadel. The gameplay is built around Shepard trying to assemble a team for a dangerous mission, and ends up seeming a bit fractured as a result; it's almost entirely one-off missions that don't really build up to anything. There are a few storyline missions you get sent on periodically, and those have more cohesion to them; the real problem with them is that they're so sparse, and all the stuff in the middle is pretty distracting. So one of the story missions comes up and you're like, wait, we're doing what? Oh, right, the plot. Lost track for a minute there and thought we were just flying around killing mercenaries.

The actual missions are quite fun. They rely heavily on the cover mechanic, though, since it's very hard to soak much damage, and that leads to the one real design problem -- you can always tell where the encounters are going to be, since you'll start seeing cover in the area. If you're walking down an empty hallway, you're safe. The mobs won't attack until you see some stuff to hide behind. This isn't a huge problem, though, since the combat itself is pretty engaging. There are a lot of different ways to play; if you want to hang back and snipe, you can do that, or you can charge right into the thick of things and go commando if you'd rather. I mean, it's your living room.

The new ammo mechanic is fairly unfun, but not as tragic as I was worried it would be. Basically what it boils down to is wasting a bunch of your goddamn time searching around cleared areas for little ammo canisters. On the bright side, ammo canisters restock all your weapons at the same time; there's no issue with needing to pick and choose which weapons to load, or with different types of ammo for different weapons. It's all magical future ammunition. They've also drastically cut the cooldowns on class powers, so you can usefully supplement your shooting with throwing fireballs or whatever also.

Mass Effect, if you'll recall, had an amazingly horrible inventory system. In the lategame you would get so many drops from everything you killed that you spent half your damn time clearing out your inventory, which wasn't much fun. The PC version was hackable to expand the inventory cap, but come on; we shouldn't need to go to such lengths just to avoid bullshit bookkeeping. In Mass Effect 2, this is not an issue; there is no inventory. All drops you get are in the form of resources of one sort or another, and you can hold those in unlimited quantity. Weapons and armour are all purchased at stores or received as special rewards during the game, and are selected from pre-mission menus; they can be upgraded using bullshit you spend hours gathering in the stupid planet-scan minigame. The only real problem I have with the items in this game is that, as near as I can tell, there is a meaningfully smaller amount of money available than the total purchase price of everything there is to buy, which means you may well end up not being able to upgrade all your gear fully.

Plotwise, the game is a bit weaker than its predecessor, with a much darker atmosphere. Personally, the first game's goofy space-opera heroism was one of my favourite things about it, and I'm not sure I'm super-excited to see everything taking a turn for the dark. Every character who survived the first Mass Effect appears again in Mass Effect 2, though some have changed rather substantially, and not necessarily in an appealing way. There are a fair few plot threads from the first Mass Effect that are not followed up here -- Banes, most annoyingly -- and quite a few plot threads left hanging at the end, giving the game that annoying middle-of-the-trilogy feel that, quite frankly, may have been inevitable. Paragon and Renegade options still exist, though the system's taken a beating this time around; the darker overall tone means that even the paragon choices often seem like asshole things to do, and the renegade options are frequently downright evil. No matter how much of a jerk you were in the first Mass Effect, you were always still the hero. This time around, they even go so far as to make Shepard look like a damn demon if you go too renegade. They've also added a whole lot more points at which you gain paragon and renegade points, and many of them seem utterly arbitrary; you should probably give up any hope of getting through the game as a "pure" paragon or renegade, since you'll be reloading until your face falls off. Way too often you'll just accumulate points for no reason you can even figure out.

The game looks good, as did the original, and it sounds good, but there are a fair few odd graphical glitches. Things clip through walls periodically, and sometimes characters will jump around during cutscenes. There are also occasional collision glitches, and Shepard sometimes will clip through solid objects and then become stuck, particularly if the vertical axis of the level is changing as Shepard is climbing or descending. There is one optional mission that is borderline-unplayable due to this bug. During story missions, save often in case you get caught in a wall and can't get back out.

As before, there are several romance options Shepard can pursue, and, if you imported a character from the first Mass Effect who had completed a romance plot, you'll start with a picture of your beloved on your desk, which is a nice touch. The sex scenes are totaly a cop-out this time, though; they don't actually proceed into the sex at all this time, cutting off right after the big kiss. What's wrong, Bioware? I thought you had the nuts to pull this stuff off. Were you all worried that you'd get stupid people riled up about your dangerous alien sex ideas again? Hell, Captain Kirk used to sleep with blue women every week back in the sixties.

The endgame I will not spoil, but it contains a series of really weird choices that appear to have totally arbitrary consequences. And it also contains a very long unskippable cinematic between the first choice and its consequence, so, if you don't like what happens, you get to wait through like ten minutes of the game's only unskippable cutscene if you reload to try again. I won't hold it against you if you look this one up. I promise.

In all, a pretty solid shoot-mans game. The ability to import save files from Mass Effect is a huge plus; it really goes a long way toward making it feel like a continuation, since all the choices you made will be reflected in the state of things in the new game. I can recommend this game to anybody who played the first Mass Effect, but it's hard to recommend to people who haven't; you seriously won't have any idea what's going on, and the game doesn't waste time telling you. So play Mass Effect first, and then Mass Effect 2. And then, hey, your save file will import into Mass Effect 3, by which time Bioware will hopefully have canned the tedious bullshit minigames and figured out a better quest structure.

Buy this game from Amazon.com!