Review: Mass Effect 2 331
- Title: Mass Effect 2
- Developer: BioWare
- Publisher: Electronic Arts
- System: Windows, Xbox 360
- Reviewer: Soulskill
- Score: 9/10
The Story
Mass Effect 2 starts off with a bang, immediately putting Commander Shepherd in rather significant peril and setting him to work with Cerberus, an organization of questionable morality that made a brief appearance in ME1. Shepherd often has reason to doubt Cerberus's trustworthiness and stated goals, but has little choice since they're the only ones who seem to be fighting the latest threat to humanity. The conflict between Shepherd and Cerberus's leader, the Illusive Man, is a plot thread that runs through the entire game, and you're given quite a bit of control over how trusting or defiant you want to be. After settling in aboard your ship, you're given a kick in the pants to begin recruiting a new team.
The storytelling in Mass Effect 2 can be divided into three discrete groups of quests — primary plot missions, squadmate missions, and side missions. When you go to recruit a member of your team, you'll do a mission that frees them from whatever they're currently involved with. Later on, each team member will pester you once to solve another problem of theirs, at which point they'll become loyal to you. In fact, after helping a few of them, you'll start anticipating when the next crewmate will come nag you for help. Fortunately, their missions are varied and interesting, and provide good background for the supporting cast. These stories are often quite personal, and in typical BioWare style, aren't afraid of setting up some complex moral dilemmas, which you can choose to solve in several different ways. Shepherd and his team deal with a broad spectrum of emotions, from compassion and regret to contempt and vengeance.
The side missions are minor plot lines you run into while exploring or doing more important things. Some are trivial, like finding a lost item or slapping somebody around; others have more depth, tasking you with determining guilt or innocence, making an arrangement with local criminals, or stumbling across characters you met in the first game. The main story itself follows up on events in ME1, and the scale is just as epic. The Paragon/Renegade system is back, but different. If you respond to an NPC in a typical "good guy" way, you'll gain Paragon points. If you're a jerk to them, you'll gain Renegade points. As you accrue enough of these points, dialog options open up that can allow you to persuade NPCs more strongly, either by appealing to their better nature or intimidating them. You no longer have to spend talent points on it.
Another nice change is the inclusion of quick-time events during cinematic scenes. Normally, I deplore QTEs, but BioWare did it right. At a potential turning point in the story, you'll get a flashing icon on your screen which will allow you to do something particularly good or particularly evil. The decision you're making isn't spelled out for you, but it's often obvious from the situation; for example, if a character you don't trust is inching toward a weapon and the red Renegade icon pops up, clicking it will make Shepherd end the conversation with a bullet. Similarly, the Paragon icon might pop up to give you the chance to stop a friend from doing something they'll regret. There's plenty of time to react to these, and no button mashing involved; it's just a simple way to move the story in the direction you prefer.
Of course, the success of the story rests on the characters, and the strength of the characters comes from voice acting, animation, and dialogue. The writing is very consistent; all of the major characters have distinct personalities and histories, and the different ways in which Shepherd can react to situations all come across as authentic. Some of your lines sound corny, but those are usually the ones that are supposed to sound corny. Far more often, you or your squadmates will sound like action heroes. The voice acting in Mass Effect 2 is excellent. BioWare has proven throughout the years that they take their dialogue seriously and do it well. What struck me was that the actors all sounded more confident in their readings, either through their own familiarity with the games or because BioWare got enough experience with the first game to provide clearer direction. Or both. In addition to the big name talent doing the main characters, there are also a surprising number of familiar voices doing smaller roles (was.. was that Worf?!).
What surprised me most was the quality of the animations. First of all, scenes are framed like you'd expect in a movie, and as any film buff will tell you, good framing makes a huge difference in how a story is viewed. Second, the characters are always doing something, even the ones that aren't talking; leaning against a desk, folding their arms, wincing or shaking their head. They aren't just static props. Third, the body movement and facial animations are quite good. Several times during the game, a character will react to something with only a facial expression, and not necessarily a simple one like shock. I think it's cool that video game characters look more like people than textured stick figures.
Gameplay
Combat in Mass Effect 2 is as simple or as complicated as you'd like to make it. Several of the old game mechanics have been cleaned up. You run around with a shield and a health bar, both of which quickly regenerate if you stop firing and stop getting shot for several seconds. This makes for very little downtime during fights. As you level you get talent points to spend on special abilities. Shepherd and each of your shipmates has a different set of skills — knockbacks, ammo specialties, the ability to hack mech enemies (one character makes a Unix reference) — and you get to choose which ones to level up. You can hotkey special abilities for Shepherd and your squadmates, and you can revive your allies if they fall in battle using medi-gel. Mass Effect 2 uses a cover system, and it's one of the more responsive systems I've played. Hitting your cover button by a corner will make you turn your back to it, and you can peek around with your gun to fire. Similarly, you can crouch behind a low barrier and fire over it. It's an intuitive system, and it almost always does exactly what you expect.
Unlike the first game, you don't have an inventory; just a selection of weapons and abilities. You can still upgrade your weapons and armor, but it's handled differently. As you move through various maps, you'll come across data pads, laptops, and dead foes that you can scan for upgrade information. Once you're back aboard your ship, you can spend resources to research any of these bits of information, and they'll do things like make your machine guns more powerful, or give you extra shielding against certain weapon types. It's much less of a pain to deal with than ME1's inventory. You can also easily control your squadmates, telling them where to go and which abilities to use on whom. The AI is reasonably smart; it can win a lot of fights by itself on the lower difficulties levels. Speaking of which — if you're fairly experienced with other shooters, you'll probably want to bump the difficulty up to the second highest setting in order to make fights interesting. On the other hand, if the fights are just part of the story for you, leaving it on Normal or Casual will let you go through the game with ease.
Ammo (sorry, heat sinks) is plentiful in this game. You'll never be in danger of running out, but you go through it quickly enough that you can't just rely on one weapon all the time. The loadout is pretty standard for a shooter; pistol, shotgun, machine gun and sniper rifle (with variations on each), and also a variety of "heavy weapons," which are fun, but you can only carry one at a time. I didn't find myself using the shotgun too often, but the other guns were fine. One complaint I have about the combat was the layout of the maps. It's always quite obvious when you're about to get ambushed; you'll round a corner and there will be a bunch of low obstacles on the ground, the perfect height for crouching behind. Any time it looks like you're ready to run the 100m hurdles, aliens are about to start shooting at you. The pacing of the combat, on the other hand, was good — another area that showed a director's touch. Individual missions are generally short — 15-30 minutes, perhaps — and the cinematics are interspersed with the combat such that you aren't doing either long enough to get bored.
The UI is well-refined; anything in the environment you need to interact with will be outlined, and extraneous information is kept to a minimum. Your abilities gray out when they're cooling down, and the icons fill in to show you how long is left on the timer. The relevant health bars are always apparent — yours, your team's, and your target's. Your aiming reticle shrinks if you stand still and fire from cover and expands if you continue firing or move around, but either way it's quite easy to see where your bullets are going. You can pause combat to switch weapons, activate abilities or order your squadmates around.
Throughout your missions you'll find bank vaults, doors, and computers that need to be "hacked" or "bypassed." Doing so brings up a short mini-game where you either connect circuits by matching the symbols on them (a la Memory) or match code segments from a scrolling list of lookalikes. These mini-games are cute the first couple times, but they never get harder or more complicated, so they get repetitious. Similarly, the mineral-gathering system is best in small doses. You gather mineral resources by flying your ship to different planets, scanning them, and launching probes. The trouble is that the scanning is done manually. You hold down a button and pass a relatively small scanning area over the entire planet. When you see readings, you press another button to fire a probe, which automatically gathers whatever it finds. Depending on how methodical you are, it can take a few minutes per planet. It's probably not annoying enough to stop the completionists, but anyone who dislikes "grindy" activities will probably get bored quickly.
This brings us to one of the major changes between ME1 and ME2: there's no Mako. BioWare apparently decided that the first game's ground vehicle was not worth keeping, so they excised it completely. Apparently some sort of vehicle will be added in future DLC, but details are sparse. If the Mako was one of your favorite parts of ME1, you may want to wait until that DLC comes out. If you didn't play ME1, you won't notice the lack. You can still find things on unexplored planets — you'll detect an "anomaly" when scanning for minerals, and a shuttle will drop you off, on foot, at the anomaly's location. The space ports and mission maps generally aren't big enough that you'd feel the need to drive around them. Or, if they are, they're sectioned off such that you don't need to traverse the entire area at one time.
Odds and Ends
The graphics are fantastic — exactly what you'd expect from a brand new BioWare game, and quite a step up from ME1. The humans look like real humans — fans of the TV show Chuck will immediately recognize one of your female squadmates — and the high level of detail makes the aliens look like something that could actually exist. While you'll pass through your fair share of typical shooter corridors and warehouses, you'll also see some extremely large and impressive environments. On one mission, you find an enormous crashed spaceship that's precariously balanced on the edge of a cliff. As you navigate the shattered vessel to recover some data, it wobbles and teeters, threatening to go over the edge as debris falls all around you. The audio is quite good as well. I find myself wishing I'd grabbed the version of the game that came with the OST. The sound effects are helpful and unobtrusive. You can glean a lot of information about what your squadmates are doing during a fight by just listening for them.
Another neat feature worth mentioning is that if you have a saved game from ME1, you can important your Shepherd into ME2, preserving a number of actions you took in the first game that will now affect how ME2 plays. It's a cool injection of continuity, and they'll be doing the same thing for ME3 in the future. You have a surprising amount of control over the how ME2 ends, so keep this in mind.
The game does have its annoyances. There was one bug I encountered frequently enough to alter my gameplay — walking near corners where textures meet on the ground will occasionally send Shepherd floating straight up in the air, unable to get down. It forces a reload, which sucks, but fortunately between the quick-save and the auto-save, I never lost more than a minute or two. I played the game on my PC, and while the controls were generally excellent, little effort was made to support things like Tab or the mousewheel, which can make menu navigation a small inconvenience.
Conclusion
Mass Effect 2 is not without its flaws, but those flaws are minor and vastly outweighed by its strengths. The story is top-notch, and meticulously plotted and paced to be fun and interesting from the intense introduction to the foreboding yet flexible ending. It's great to see that BioWare was willing to take feedback to heart and make significant changes regardless of ME1's success. While the sequel doesn't seem as novel and innovative as the first game, it instead demonstrates a great deal of refinement and polish. I'll be looking forward to Mass Effect 3.
Re:Will I be lost? (Score:4, Informative)
Warning (Score:5, Informative)
Re:DRM? (Score:3, Informative)
DRM on the first game was removed with an official patch AFAIK.
Re:DRM? (Score:4, Informative)
That's because other than a simple DVD check, there is no DRM. EA actually learned their lesson, believe it or not.
Now the included 'free' DLC to inhibit used game sales is another story...
Re:Will I be lost? (Score:5, Informative)
I'd suggest watching something awful's "let's play" for mass effect 1 [somethingawful.com](they play through the entire game - ~30min video by video, with explanations of the what and the why, they speed up past boring parts, etc), and also to pick up a savegame [annakie.com] from mass effect 1 to go with it. Once you understand the first game, the savegame you select and it's rammifications, it'll make the second game more fun.
As a note: lets play for mass effect 1 costs you $0 to watch. So you're "picking up" the first game, in a sense. Also you can get mass effect 2 on PC via demonoid quite easily if you want to see if it's worth the buying. I'd say that it kinda is, except that you get shafted on having to buy DLC either way.
My Review (Score:5, Informative)
Mass Effect 2.
I'm going to answer the main question simply. Yes, You should buy it. It's an excellent game and you will get more hours of quality enjoyment out of it than most.
This review tends to focus on the negatives. Don't be fooled, it's a great game that will provide more enjoyment than most, and for a lot longer. I got 23 hours out of my first playthrough, and have already started on another. The replayability here is massive, and I'd expect most people would be able to put 100 hours into this game easily without loosing enjoyment. If I havn't pointed it out here specifically, you can presume it's excellent, otherwise I'd mention it. That's what I'm saying.
To put it into perspective, this is from one 23 hour run through of the game, as a soldier and going for the paragon (good) side. I've started another (around 2 hours in) as a renegade vanguard, and the experience is very different, and I'm still finding new stuff and hearing new, interesting dialogue.
Is it better than the original? Probably not, but it's not worse either. I'd say they kept it on the same level somehow, which isn't a bad thing - Mass Effect ranks up there as one of my favourite games of all time.
I'm going to go for the storyline first. You are playing as Sheperd again, this time fighting for Cerberus, a pro-human group, instead of the alliance.
It's a good plotline, that expands as you go on through the game. That said, it does feel a little weaker than the original. There seems to me to be less of the main plotline than in the original, which is dissapointing. That said, what is there is fun.
The team over at BioWare seem to have taken the issues people had with the original and focussed on them: the inventory, the mako, the way people tended to play with the same companions and weapons all the time. Unfortunately, they seem to have overcompensated.
The inventory system in the original was a little overcomplicated, and did have it's problems - especially the 150 item limit that forced you to turn items to omni-gel one at a time if you went over it. I would have settled for a little bit of simplification and a 'turn all to omni-gel' button. Instead they have pulled the entire system and give you a choice of weapons each time you leave the ship or come across a weapons locker. Nice idea, but the problem is that the choice of weapons is abysmal. You get around 2 of each type of weapon, and around 5 heavy weapons. It's also not a case of buying weapons much, but rather finding them as you progress through the game.
The mako in the original was a little annoying. The tasks often seemed dull and without much reward. The driving segments were not the best ever, but they were not horrible. Again, I think a little change, offering mako upgrades, reducing the amount you had to use it, etc... would have been fine. Instead they have completely removed the mako from the game. Replacing the mineral analysing bit with a boring planet scanning/probe dropping minigame, which really isn't an improvement. If anything, it's worse as the mako at least had good moments. The scanner is just dull.
The way people tended to keep the same weapons in use has been taken on with the ammo system. They have replaced the overheating mechanism (which I liked) from the original with a system of 'heat clips' (clips of heatsinks that take the heat from the weapon). At least it's well explained. Most people would say this was to try and create a more standard shooter experience (like the move to a crosshair over a reticule). This is probably true, but I'd say it's more to try and get people to vary which weapon they use more. Ammo (which is standard accross all weapons) is always in short supply, mainly due to the fact you can only carry very limited ammunition, with all of the armour upgrades that allow increased ammo capacity, it amounted to around 12 rounds for the sniper rifle, 30 for the shotgun, 20 for the pistol, and around 100 for the battle rifle (or 400 for the assult rifle).
Considering the number of enemies you come up against, you run out of ammo very fast, and generally have to deplete two weapons of ammo for a fight before you can push forward to scrounge up from the enemies you have killed. Maybe this matters less for a non-solider class, but it was annoying. What makes less sense is you use the same ammo for all of your guns, and yet when you pick it up, it gets automatically allocated to one, and you can't use it in any of the others. It'd make more sense to have a general stockpile, but as I say, I think the entire system was designed to encourage using different weapons (or powers) more, hence the reason in doing it this way.
Is it good? It's... different. I personally preffered having the overheating mechanism and choosing to use weapons based on what I wanted. That said, this definitely adds difficulty and creates more of a feeling of urgency when you are fighting. It's definitely a sinking feeling when you fire off your last shotgun round while still surrounded by husks and realise you have no ammo left. I definitely did use my sniper rifle, shotgun, and pistol more than I did in ME1.
The other major change is the control scheme. Those used to ME1 will find buttons have moved all over the place. I don't think it makes too much of a difference to be quite honest, and you get used to it quick enough. Annoyingly, the one control they didn't change was splitting up skip text and make choice. This means skipping through text often leads to making choices by accident.
They have also changed up the ranking/experience system. Again this has been dumbed down to suit the slightly less RPG styled game that ME2 is. There are less options and less ranks. It feels a lot less important than it did too. The main one that hit me was the removal of charm/intimidate, which have been cut out. Instead of paragon/renegade points unlocking charm/intimidate, which you then have to buy, they have cut out the middleman, and now paragon points unlock paragon dialogue options. This works well enough. The introduction of the paragon/renegade action options during conversations is also fun and well implemented, with the ability to perform actions with a well timed click during a conversation where it is appropriate. This has been well implemented with a left click for renegade, right click for paragon, meaning you shouldn't accidently perform the wrong action by thinking that it's the other one and doing it (they don't come in pairs).
The gameplay is good overall, but the universe feels shrunk, and the gameplay feels less open. The areas of the citadel you can access have been shrunk down massively, and the areas in general feel less open. There seems to be slightly less to do. I found less side-missions than I did in the original. This said, I have only run through it once at a good pace, so I may have missed plenty (and I definitely intend to replay). The main storyline (no spoilers) follows you running around and picking up teammates. While in the original, this happened very quickly at the beginning (unless you waited a long time before picking up Liara). In the sequel, this is the majority of the game, and you spend your time running around finding your team.
This is where it comes to the part that I liked least in ME2. The 'loyalty' scheme. You pick up each memeber of your team, who isn't particularly loyal. You then have to do a mission that they want to make them loyal. This seems really forced and repetative. For example, some of your teammates that come back from the first game are not loyal to you, to me, that was weird. They constantly talk about you with reverence and respect, as in the first game, willing to follow you to death and all, and yet they are not loyal? It's weird. What's more annoying is the fact that it's one mission for each person. There is no mixture of chatting and help, not just some small things and big things. One mission exactly each. It definitely doesn't feel natural. A system where loyalty was built by talking to them, doing missions with them, and helping them out would have been better, rather than doing one mission each to help them out. This feels really forced when it gets into the pattern of pick them up, one mission later they want to speak to you and have some problem you need to help with, then you earn their loyalty.
A system where you have to slowly build up loyalty over time - and could loose it - would have been far more immersive and interesting, and felt less like jumping through hoops. The worst part was the missions all felt like cookie cutter, go into here, shoot people, come out. Even the missions that had potential as interesting ones inevitably came out like that for one reason or another. The most interesting one broke this patten and saw you following someone from above, tracking them and waiting for an assasin to come from them. It was refreshing and interesting, and it's a shame there wasn't more of that kind of thing.
The game seems pretty stable, I didn't have any crashes, and the only bug I encountered was getting stuck on corners occasionally (fortunately use the quicksave key [F5], a lot so didn't loose any progress to it).
Now, you might be looking at this game with a negative viewpoint by now, and I apologise for that, as I really didn't mean to show it that way. It's simply easier to point out the wrong things, because everything else in this game is nigh-on perfect. It's incredibly fun, with a load of content, engaging storyline and gameplay, good graphics, and with huge amounts of playtime and replay value.
The games best strength is in it's dialogue. There is so much stuff that made me laugh out loud. To give some examples of my favourites, without spoilers:
Joker and EDI's conversations.
A human trying to explain to some aliens what a bachelor party is in a bar.
The game salesman on the citadel.
Things that the scientist salarian (Mordin) says and does. There is one particular part where he does something extremely out of character. You'll know when you get it. It's hilarious. At another point, if you follow a certain sub-plot, he offers you some interesting advice that had me in fits of laughter.
In fact, there are a number of jabs at DRM that BioWare have put in that will bring a smile to any PC gamer's lips.
My favourite conversation has to be the one other thing they have pulled from the game, the elevators. No longer do you sit in them - I actually liked them quite a lot (except the length of time they took (particularly the one in the normandy)). If you bring Garrus and Tali out into the citadel and walk up some stairs, Garrus reminices about old times in elevators, with some hilarious conversation.
The news you used to hear in them has been replaced by terminals you can hit up to listen while you walk around - these are scattered around popular worlds.
The game has some moments where they do change up the gameplay and offer something really different from normal, and it works well, I'd have loved to see more of this, as what is there is great.
There are a lot of links back to the old game - mainly in conversation, but also in events. Choice you made do take effect in large ways in places, and it's definitely best experienced by playing both games.
Overall, Mass Effect 2 is an excellent game, definitely worth playing, and replaying. The storyline is very good. It's got intrigue, and the way it plays out works. It does suffer from being in the middle - it begins where ME1 left off, and ends where ME3 will begin, so it doesn't feel as... important as the first one did. That said, it's still an epic storyline that you'll want to know all about.
Just to make my opinion on the game clear: I have focussed on negative points a lot in this review, simply because it'd be impossible to list everything good. It's a great game, although I do think it's had too much RPG stripped out of it. Some people might prefer it, but I think they have overreacted to some problems and gone too far with the 'fixes', and would have preferred to see more RPG elements kept onboard.
Re:I actually kind of miss the old combat system (Score:3, Informative)
I dunno man. Your argument kind of falls into "deconstruction ad absurdum" territory of finding something that's probably not there. The whole concept of "turn" is that I take an action, you take an action, till the game is over. Typically, the "turn" involves a significant amount of pause as I think about my action.
I hardly see how FPS, Simulators, or RTS fall into this turn thing. Turn-based vs. realtime in gaming these days pretty much falls into whether the time elements are discrete vs. indiscrete, and it really is pushing things to claim that everything is discrete.
Re:I actually kind of miss the old combat system (Score:3, Informative)
Re:DRM? (Score:3, Informative)
Not only that, it makes even less sense for the Steam version. Not only is it not in-game (and the game keeps saying "New content available" even though I've downloaded it all), but it doesn't integrate even slightly into Steam. Steam has a whole system for handling DLC, but ME2 has you going to some EA website, registering stuff, and running installer apps to shove stuff into the Steam game directory.