Mass Effect 2 Review
Posted on 16. Feb, 2010 by Rock'nRolf in PC RPG Reviews
BioWare is leading the RPG genre today, which isn’t such a bad thing considering everything they touch turns to gold. With Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Origins respectively, BioWare has taken a detour from the beaten track of licensed games. Although their games in the Forgotten Realms and Star Wars settings are great too, so are BioWare’s original creations.
Plot
Mass Effect 2 continues where the first part left off – but where did it leave off? You made some game-changing choices in the first chapter, so tying all those loose ends together must have been extremely problematic for the developers. Without spoiling the surprises, they did an amazing job – the sequel is better in almost every way.
After a playable intro, the game starts with an organization called Cerberus trying to locate the missing Shepard. Cerberus motive is to protect human colonies that are under attack by a biomechanical race known as the Reapers, and to do this they need Shepard, who is the only one in the galaxy with knowledge on how to defeat the Reapers.
BioWare has gone to great lengths to make sure that the choices you made in the original Mass Effect are acknowledged in Mass Effect 2. Familiar characters you run into will often remember what happened in the first game. Of course, if you want to start with a brand new character that’s possible too by “reconstructing” Shepard as you want to remember him. Transferring your original character gives you some benefits, but nothing that makes or breaks the game. An important note is that the romance options will carry over.
Tweaked Gameplay
The gameplay in Mass Effect 2 looks highly similar to its predecessor, but BioWare has improved on some key aspects to make the whole thing smoother. The overall movements have been polished significantly – in duck-and-cover situations for example, your characters will behave more intelligently and not run willingly into the line of fire, which occasionally happened in the first game. As usual, you will also be able to pause the game mid-action to assign actions. Different enemies may require a vastly different approach in terms of skill use, ammo and tactics.
Tweaking you characters’ stats and managing the inventory is simplified, but there’s still room for some fine-tuning. The Paragon/Renegade meter is still around, and the intimidate/charm skills are now relative to your alignment instead of utilized as separate skills – in other words you don’t need to spend valuable skill points on them. Both the weapons and managing the weapons have been improved for Mass Effect 2 – especially the smaller weapon types like pistols and sniper rifles. There are no “full-body” armor types; rather you can mix the different parts however you want.
ME2 retains the conversation wheel with different responses, but there’s an added twist: you can sometimes interrupt a conversation mid-sentence and start firing (or some other, less fun action). What choices you have here depends on you Paragon/Renegade status.
Visuals
Although it’s the same game engine, the graphics have also been improved in the new game. There are more details allover and the characters look (even) more realistic, and are able to express emotions more convincingly with new facial animations. The game still has some quirks here and there, but there are no overly disturbing bugs – most or all of them are likely corrected with an upcoming patch.
To summarize, BioWare has listened to the community and improved on a game that was already excellent. Mass Effect 2 isn’t perfect, but it is better than the first game in the series and it’s an absolute must for any sci-fi RPG fan.
