Summary [9.9 out of 10]

Delivering yet another stunning RPG experience, Bioware is back with Mass Effect 2. Players once again assume the role of Commander Shepard to save the universe from another massive threat. This time, humans are disappearing from settlements all over the Terminus system thanks to a new galactic menace colloquially known as the Collectors. Recruited by Cerberus, a shadowy mercenary outfit Shepard tangled with in the first game, the Commander must gather a team for a suicide mission to stop the Collectors before they wipe humanity off the star map forever.

In this outing, Bioware looks to smooth out the Mass Effect experience and bring gameplay up to the standards of the story.

They succeed.

Mass Effect 2 is a triumph in almost every regard and elevates the experience out of passive button mashing and navigating binary morality choices and into the most perfect synergy of interactive storytelling, gameplay and role-playing I have ever experienced. The consequences are real and the penalties for bad decisions are harsh. This is hands down one of the most compelling and rewarding game experiences I have ever had.

Introduction

The first Mass Effect was great. I played through several times making different choices with different sorts of characters just to see the differences in the story and there were a lot. I grew very fond of my crew and in the moment when I had to make a Sophie’s Choice between two of them I found the decision challenging and heart-breaking.

As much as I liked the game, there were a lot of things about it that were not so great. The combat got repetitive, the resource gathering was hopelessly broken and boring, the elevator rides cum load screens were terrible, the driving sequences were hamstrung by frustrating controls and the item management was so confusing and difficult to deal with I often found myself playing with bad gear just to avoid having to deal with it. With that many deep issues, it is a testament to the quality of the story and character interaction that I loved the game so much. I spent a lot of time thinking about how cool it would be to marry those great aspects up with satisfying combat and upkeep systems that didn’t make me want to pull my hair out. I was not alone and players were vocal about the game’s issues, looking forward to the next installment but also calling for some maintenance. An amazing thing happened: Bioware listened.

I will address the specific improvements in the bullet points below but I want to just take a minute to reflect on how cool it is that a company listened to criticism and improved things so dramatically without taking away from the core experience, much in the same way that Ubisoft did with Assassin’s Creed II.

This still feels like Mass Effect and even with some fairly wide sweeping changes and refinements, the game never loses sight of itself or compromises its core. There are some people out there who disagree on this point and feel like the game has betrayed its RPG roots to cater to shooter fans but I think that is complete poppycock. I could fill a whole article on why I reject this soundly (come to think of it, I just might do that) but, for the moment, suffice it to say that Mass Effect 2 is every bit the role-playing masterpiece that the first game tried so valiantly to be.

Editor’s Note: He isn’t kidding, Mass Effect 2 plays perfectly. It’s a gaming experience akin to Uncharted 2 – the games and gameplay are nothing alike, but both games are designed so well and the stories so excellent that you just flow through the experience, loving every minute of it.

The Great

• Importing: This is an odd bullet point to start with, and is connected with some that will follow, but one of the best things about Mass Effect 2 is the ability to import your character from the first game and continue his or her story. This isn’t a necessarily new concept, especially for Bioware, but this really allows the player to connect with the character and story in a way that is unprecedented in gaming. When you import your character many of your choices from the first game, both big and small, carry over and effect your story. Were you nice to a reporter? Did you give a random minion one last chance to change her ways? Were you able to talk your way out of a dangerous situation or did you have to use deadly force? All of these sorts of things have an impact on the story in Mass Effect 2 and it gives you a much greater sense of the universe and your position in it. Knowing that the choices will carry over into the third installment and getting a taste of how it will happen makes you more aware of how you play and what it will mean for the future. It really grounds you and makes you more invested in the story. Not that you have to import a character or have to have played the first game to enjoy Mass Effect 2, but it really, really helps. Particularly in the next point…

• Immersion: Lots of games claim to be able to provide an experience that makes you feel like you are really a part of the game but most fall short of their goal. Mass Effect 2 does not. Mass Effect 2 does things that a lot of other games do like allowing for character creation and customization and branching dialogue but what really sets it apart from other similar efforts is the very real sense that your choices matter. This is seen clearly when you bring your character over because you realize that decisions really will effect future games and you start to think about them that much more as you look ahead to Mass Effect 3. But even if you didn’t import and you are starting a new character from scratch, decisions you make don’t just have impact on the far flung future when the next installment comes out, they effect the outcome of the current one in ways other games promise but don’t deliver. Beyond the choice issue, the dialogue really helps this along as well. The dialogue options are not as robust as in Dragon Age: Origins but giving Shepard a voice and distinct personality makes up for it. And when I say personality, that doesn’t mean that he or she is set. Because of improvements to the morality system, you are free to make decisions on behavior that shapes a personality for the character that sets him/her apart from other players’ characters. When I play my Paragon Patrick Shepard, he is very different than my Renegade Ashley Shepard. That all of this is performed by voice actors really makes you feel that much more that this is a fully fleshed out character. I know that a lot of developers think that players disconnect with the character if it has its own voice and leave main characters silent, but I disagree completely. I don’t imagine myself actually saying the things that my mute character is saying because I am not always playing a one to one avatar of myself. Shepard here is fully formed and is unique to the player which really draws said player into the drama. Because of these things, the story is given much more gravitas and you feel much more connected to the characters and events.

• Combat: As mentioned above, the combat in Mass Effect 2 is a source of contention for some players. Apparently well constructed and rewarding combat doesn’t have a place in some people’s role-playing experience as they apparently favor clunky button mashing interfaces or some sort of turn based affair in which you choose a vague option and then sit there watching over-blown animation do the same thing over and over again. The combat in the first Mass Effect was a lot of ducking behind cover and pressing the A button at a targeted foe until they were dead. It looked like action gameplay but really it was a lot of die rolling and stat work going on behind the scenes. For its cover based mechanic, many people labeled it Gears of War lite.  The combat in Mass Effect 2 still relies on cover based mechanics but here you actually aim and shoot in real time. This is what has lead to the charge that the game is really just a third person shooter with some RPG elements thrown in. All it is really doing is making the combat fun and skill based instead of relying on stats. If you aren’t very good at shooters you can play on the casual setting as that is what it is for. But to write it off as a simple shooter would be doing the combat a grave disservice. With the inclusion of biotic and tech powers, and the vagaries of each class(discussed below) as well as the inclusion of your squadmates abilities and weapons, the combat becomes a deep strategic experience that allows for multiple play styles which can cater to the players’ varying skill sets. If you want to play it like a straight shooter, then you can do that. If you want to hang back and use powers on enemies you can do that too. If you want to hide behind a box and let your squad mates handle the heat you can do that too. The combat is as deep or as shallow as you want it to be and can form fit to your tastes and strengths.

*** POSSIBLE SPOILERS IN VIDEO, WATCH AT YOUR OWN RISK ***

• Classes:  The class system found in Mass Effect 2 takes the first game’s classes and tweaks them. Instead of having Soldiers, Adepts, Engineers and then three additional classes that combines two of the base class’ powers, Mass Effect 2 makes each class distinct and in doing so changes the way that each class must be played. For instance a Vanguard is no longer just a soldier with a handful of biotic powers. The Vanguard has become a rough and tumble class for people who like to rush into battle guns blazing and taking big risks. This class has three weapon proficiencies, a biotic attack called Shockwave which knocks enemies off their feet, Pull which yanks enemies off their feet and floats them across the room, and Charge which  surrounds the player with energy as he/she rushes from across the room and slams into the enemy temporarily stunning it long enough to finish it off with a well placed shotgun blast. Throw in two unique ammo types and you have a pretty badass class for rushing in and doing a lot of damage. Also dying. A lot. But then you look at the Infiltrator a class with tech powers and active cloaking and you have a character that can turn mechs against each other and essentially sucker punch enemies (with guns) and then disappear. A Sentinel has tech armor and a suite of biotic powers to allow you to eschew some of the gun play for awesome Jedi-style moves. THEN there are the three base classes, each with their own style of play. These aren’t just simple power tweaks. If you try playing a Sentinel like you would play a Vanguard you are going to get much more acquainted with failure much more quickly than you had hoped. The class system lets you further cater to your needs and strengths so you can get the most out of Mass Effect 2’s game play.

*** POSSIBLE SPOILERS IN VIDEO, WATCH AT YOUR OWN RISK ***

• Writing: When you are dealing with a game of this depth the writing absolutely has to be there. It doesn’t matter what features you have or how great the combat is, without strong writing you aren’t going to be left with a truly compelling and engrossing role-playing experience. Like everything else in the game, Mass Effect 2 really excels in the writing department. The dialogue tends to be mature and believable and is often surprising in terms of where it goes. The story itself, while kind of simple in the broad strokes is deep and engrossing in the details. The richness of the writing and the story’s pacing and emotional beats is stunning when considered next to many titles in the genre which pedal ridiculous melodrama at best and outright ridiculous bullshit at best. The writing even improves upon the first installment which strayed into a bit of silliness at times. Here, while there is a sense of humor evident in the writing, we never get into anything patently ridiculous or over the top. It would be impossible to care about Shepard or any of the characters if the story and writing were poor but luckily the player is in very good hands in this department. I’ve never had this profound an emotional response from a game’s story before and that is saying something as I praised Dragon Age in much the same way. Much like James Cameron, apparently the only ones who can top Bioware is Bioware.

• Consequence: In a game like Fable 2 your choices are supposed to have consequences and they do to a limited extent. If you give evidence to a guard or a criminal changes how that district will be later in the game. That was cool and all, but in Mass Effect 2 the consequences go deeper than that. As mentioned above, because of the whole character importing thing, choices that you make can have far reaching effects and that is always in the back of the player’s mind. Beyond the whole multi-game thing, choices make a big difference to the final outcome of this game too. I am not really going to give away spoilers, but if you want to know nothing at all about the end game then  move on to the next bullet point and know that choices you make matter. Everyone gone? Good, okay so the consequences can be simple like a character not talking to you anymore or making things a little more difficult in combat if you done bring along the right gun but it also goes much deeper than that. This is a suicide mission and the stakes are high. If you make the wrong decision you can end up with a very sad ending. And given how compelling the characters are and how attached you can get with them, it can be REALLY sad if you do the wrong things at the wrong time with the wrong people. These sorts of decisions are not super obvious either. You can think you are doing everything right and then be horrified by the outcome. Little hints and clues are there to steer you the right way but if you don’t pay enough attention you will find yourself hurt and confused while watching the credits roll. Some people might think this is a bad thing but I think it really amps up the reality of the situation and elevates the tension. To know that you could be surprised at any time by some unintended consequence further highlights the immersion this game delivers. It all matters and there are no throwaway decisions.

• Characters: The first Mass Effect had great characters and by the end there was a real affection for them. In Mass Effect 2, aside from two characters, you have a whole new team. This was kind of heartbreaking at first. Sure you get to talk to and interact with most of your team from the first game  but it isn’t the same. Initially, I was resistant to a new crop of characters but as I talked to them and did their loyalty missions, I found that the relationships with these characters are much deeper than those in the first game. You might not like all of them, but they are all compelling and well defined. There aren’t any one dimensional characters on your team and the depth each contains makes the danger to them much more real. The option of romancing some of them makes the connection that much stronger. Much like the first game, there is a very real possibility that not all of them will make it and for that to mean anything you have to care about them. Without giving too much away I found myself absolutely horrified and almost brought to tears when a bad move went really wrong. The characters are well written and very well fleshed out. It is a good thing too because much of the game rests on their shoulders and if they were a miss the whole thing would come tumbling down.

• Voice Acting: Celebrity voice acting isn’t anything new in video games and it is kind of a hit and miss proposition in terms of elevating quality. Mass Effect 2 has a great voice cast and is a mixture of celebrities and game voice actors. One of the cool things about it is that while the celebrity talent does a great job, there is no noticeable difference in quality between them and the lesser known actors. Everyone does a great job and it further cements the sense of immersion. Martin Sheen is a real standout as the Illusive Man and Seth Green’s Joker is just as good as he was last time but everyone is good. The cast list is extensive and with names like Adam Baldwin (Firefly, Chuck, too much else to mention), Carrie-Anne Moss(the Matrix), Tricia Helfer(Battlestar Galactica), Michael Dorn(Star Trek: the Next Generation), and Michael Hogan(Battlestar Galactica) you basically have a sci-fi fan’s wet dream. Had they thrown in Nathan Fillion I think my head might have exploded. Genre actors Shohreh Aghdashloo(24, Flash Forward) and Yvonne Strahovski(Chuck) are also excellent. Mark Meers and Jennifer Hale also stand out as the male and female Shepard respectively.

• Replay: With so many options, play styles, and outcomes available this game is just made for replay. There is so much to do here and even more to do differently. Given that the choices you make have real impact and can change the flow of the game, it is very worth it to play through multiple times. Repeat trips through are rewarded by money and mineral bonuses as well as a bonus power. There is a lot to do and see and many different angles from which to see it. If it takes another two years for Bioware to deliver Mass Effect 3, then you could still be playing by then and may not have seen it all. That might be an exaggeration but there is a lot to do. As testament to the compelling replay, I had Bioshock 2 sitting on my lap this morning fresh from Amazon and ready to go and I elected to get back into my third character in Mass Effect 2.

• Morality: Mass Effect 2 isn’t as morally gray as, say, Dragon Age was but it also steps up a bit from the moral tug of war going on in the first game.  Again you have two meters showing your Paragon (good) level and Renegade (bad) level but instead of the filling of one decreasing the other, they both just fill. This means that if you are running a Paragon and you happen to think hitting a guy with a taser while his back is turned so that you will have a better chance of surviving later is a good idea, you don’t get docked ‘good’ points just because you get some bad ones. Now it might seem counter intuitive insofar as being a douche will eventually erode away at your good guy image but think about it, doing good things in life doesn’t take away bad things you did and vice versa. Donating $400,000 to an orphan charity doesn’t erase cheating on your wife. People can do good and bad things without becoming some kind of angel or demon. Of course if you do more of one than the other you are going to find yourself regarded as whichever the more dominate one happens to be. So both meters fill according to your actions. It is best not to ride the fence too much though because being neutral will make you miss out on persuasion options that will save you a lot of grief in the long run. There is a visual component to your morality on your characters appearance as well, which is kind of cool.

• Mordin: I have already talked about the characters but Salarian Scientist Mordin Solus really stands out. He is not a black and white kind of character as his actions are either really good or really bad depending on your point of view. Whichever side of the fence you happen to fall, Morin is still a fun character. He talks super fast and is blunt and honest often to very amusing effect. He will also sing Gilbert and Sullivan to you if you play your cards right. You should pick him first and talk to him often. And actually pay attention to what he has to say.

The Good

• Graphics: Proving that Bioware actually does still know how to make a game look good, the graphics in Mass Effect 2 are a step up from what we were served a few months ago in Dragon Age. The visuals are in no danger of challenging the likes of Uncharted 2 or Metal Gear Solid 4 but they are very pretty. The facial detail and animation is a huge step up from the first game and the effects like biotic powers are sharp and cool looking. Everything looks much more polished and even the planets are interesting to look at. Where the last game got into some repetitive environments, this one changes it up quite a bit from location to location. It looks really nice and Bioware did a nice job squeezing the juice out of the 360.

• Controls: For Mass Effect 2 the number of powers and attacks you can do have been streamlined. I am not sure if that was just to simplify a somewhat bloated system or if it was done for the sake of the controls but the outcome is a tight control scheme that feels good and is intuitive. Where Dragon Age suffered from confusing controls and poor button mapping, everything you want is right where you can get to it. You can map your powers to a face button and the shoulder buttons and you fire with the trigger buttons. If you need to change guns or use one of your squad mate’s powers you can pop into the respective wheels with a button hold. The D-pad is for squad directions and that is that. It is very streamlined and easy and once you are used to it you won’t have to think about what you are doing with the controller at all. This is how control should be done.

• Side-Quests: Side-quests in the first game were kind of hit and miss. Some of them were fun but others were overlong messes that didn’t bring anything new to the table and just made things a bit of a slog. This outing thankfully fixes this issue by making the side-quests fun, varied and short. You won’t spend a huge amount of time on any of these which keeps them fun and avoids disrupting the flow of the rest of the game. I haven’t done all of these yet but I have done WAY more than I ever did in the first game. My first completion time for the original game was 26 hours and 31 minutes whereas my completion this time around was 47 hours and 17 minutes. That should tell you something right there.

• Resource Gathering: If you asked me, I couldn’t even tell you how the first game did resource gathering. It wasn’t very important and if I did it, it was usually by accident. This has changed in the sequel. It is very important and it can be really fun. I could see how it would get annoying too. Basically you orbit a planet and scan it. Your initial scan will let you know it is rich with minerals or poor and everything in between. From there you move your scanner’s cross-hairs across the planet’s surface listening and watching for mineral spikes which are your cue to launch a probe and collect your booty. The minerals you gather here are necessary for upgrading your ship and your weapons and armor so there is really no getting around doing this if you hate it, but for me, I found it to be an amusing distraction, a way to have some downtime from the action and just a bit like gambling. Once you get the scanner upgrade, the whole process is much faster. I thought it was a pretty cool mechanic for something that could have been excruciating.

• Improvements: I have already touched upon most of these in other sections but overall, Bioware really cut out all of the fat from the first game and either did away with the faulty bits altogether or provided a better mechanic to handle it. The clunky and confusing item management is gone, the elevator rides are gone (in favor of some loading screens which can be longish unless you download the game to your hard drive), the uninspired combat is gone in favor of something much more exciting, the driving/exploration sections are removed entirely and gun overheating is now handled with ‘ammo’ clips. One of the biggest changes was to the inventory and experience systems. You don’t find pieces of armor and upgrades, there’s no omni-gel. You don’t have to worry about carrying around a lot of crap you can’t use because you aren’t the right class in hopes that someone else on the crew might be able to use it. All of that is simplified out of the equation. Now you have your basic armor, which you can customize the look of, and you get upgrades to it through research projects funded using the resources that you gather from canned planets. Same goes for weapons upgrades. Once you get the upgrades they are usable by everyone. The experience is now awarded for finishing missions instead of killing enemies which keeps you from ever having to try and grind your way to the next level. The whole thing is very streamlined and keeps the action back where it belongs, in the combat and in the story.

• Character Creator: I have to give this a shout out for letting you create characters that don’t all look Asian this time. I have nothing against Asians but it doesn’t do much for trying to make my character look like me when the only eye choices are Asian ones. This time around, my Shepard looked very much like me…which I concluded wasn’t such a great thing after all. But anyway, the creator is robust and you can make characters look like all sorts of people.

The Bad:

• Glitches: It pains me greatly to have to say this but there are some glitches here and there in the game that keep the experience from being perfect. During my play time I only found two glitches, although a few more have been reported. The ones I encountered were: getting stuck in the environment and having to turn off the system and go back in, which happened twice, and the game freezing in the opening scenes before the character creator, which also happened twice. Both of those are widely reported so it wasn’t just something going on with my disc. I didn’t really think either of these were that big of a deal but were minor annoyances. In the face of how good the experience is, I am not letting them hamper how I feel about the game over all.

• Lack of Helmet Removal: This is a very small nit-picky issue but for some reason all of the downloadable armor available have helmets and those helmets stay on during mission conversations. It sucks to go through all of the creation stuff and have Shepard look the way you want only to not be able to see his/her face when wearing custom armor. Dragon Age avoided this issue by not displaying the helms and hats during conversations. You would think that someone from that team would mention it to this team. Anyway, it isn’t a big deal just an annoying one.

Miscellaneous

• Two Discs: Some people would put the fact that Mass Effect 2 takes up two discs and requires a tiny bit of swapping in the bad column. I have a hard time docking the game for having too much to fit on one disc. It seems counter productive. Sony loyalists have taken this as an opportunity to point out that the PS3 with its blu-ray storage room would not need two discs and use this point to illustrate the PS3’s superiority over the 360. I would argue that the fact that the 360 has Mass Effect 2 in the first place illustrates its superiority. Not that I care which system is better. I own all three and I think they all have their strength and weaknesses. Games make the difference and all of them have strong enough games to make them worth owning.

Conclusion [ 9.9 out of 10]

I want to be very clear about something here. The ONLY reason I didn’t give this game a perfect 10 is that I can’t call something perfect when it has  glitches no matter how minor. That is the one thing that Bioware seems to struggle with at this point is sending out buggy games.

This isn’t new.

When I got Knights of the Old Republic for the Xbox, I couldn’t get it to load because it had created a faulty save when it booted up. I had to have Bioware customer service tell me how to deal with it before I could play even a second of the game. They really need to do something about issues like these because otherwise Mass Effect 2 is absolutely perfect. I couldn’t ask for anything more from it aside from literally more in the form of Mass Effect 3. The  ending leaves you with a cliff hanger that makes the wait for the next one excruciating and it has only been out a little over a week. If you are on the fence about this game, get off the fence and clear your schedule.

If you are a shooter fan looking for some story depth then try it out. If you are an RPG fan at all you should try it out. If you love good games then definitely try it. 2010 games are going to have to try really hard to beat Mass Effect 2 for game of the year. It is just that good.

Editor’s Note: Agree with Patrick’s review. I got the game on a Monday and played 10 hours a day for 3 days until I was done, took me just a hair over 30 hrs to do pretty much every quest, even the side ones you get in the “secondary missions” tab of your screen. I absolutely loved the story, loved the characters and couldn’t get enough of it.

It’s brilliant like any well-told story is. You hear people walk out of Avatar saying how great it was, and then you go see it and are like “What the hell, this is a standard love story?” — yea maybe that’s true, but it’s the way it’s told. With so much vivid color and detail you just don’t want to stop looking at the screen. Mass Effect 2 is the same way.

I would point out though, this is very definitely a BioWare RPG — if you have never liked Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age or any of their games, there is nothing new or different enough here to change your mind. So don’t throw away MW2 just yet.