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Introduction

Mass Effect 2 is second game of the BioWare's action RPG game series, and it was released January 2010 for PC and XBox 360. PlayStation 3 version has been announced to be released during January 2011. This review is of the PC version, so there could be some minor differences between my experiences and those experienced with console version.

I tried to avoid spoilers as much as possible, but there still is few, so if you want to avoid them don't read any further.

Graphics

The graphics are good, especially if you happen to have very good video card. They are not the best you can find from games released lately, but sufficient to fulfill their purpose. So far I have seen no graphical glitches besides the strange "jumping" during conversations, and those are caused by the fact that characters suddenly change stances and expressions when you select topic or response which requires them to different from the current one.

Story

Mass Effect 2 begins where the first game left. The initial threat caused by Sovereign has been removed and Captain Shepard patrols the space with the ship Normandy. At the beginning of the game Normandy is ambushed by unknown ship, and torn to pieces. While trying to safe the crew Shepard is killed and lost in space. After two years since the destruction of Normandy human organization called Cerberus success in resurrecting Shepard, for his skills and knowledge is needed to deal with another problem; small human colonies are attacked by unknown, leaving only empty buildings with no survivors nor even a single body. The council of Citadel, which now has human influence due the the events of Mass Effect 1, is reluctant to investigate the ambushes. It is also revealed at the beginning of the game that the clash with Sovereign has been labeled as "Did not happen" or "Just another ambush of Geths". The existence of Reapers is questioned again, and Sovereign is considered just highly advanced Geth spaceship.

Now, the story of the Mass Effect 2 follows the investigation of the ambushes, the revelation of the connection between them and Reapers, and the stopping of those ambushes. The story advances in forms of missions, just like in the previous game, but this time there is more linear feel to it. The feeling is caused by the fact that after each successful mission you get a screen where the causes of the mission is told in short, the resources you gathered during the mission is listed as well as any technology you found and the monetary reward you got for completing the mission. This screen follows every major quest as well as most of the minor ones. So, the story feels a lot more linear.

The story itself if interesting, with lots of hooks and surprising discoveries to be made. The histories of Protheans, Reavers, Geths and many other civilizations are expanded through the process of completing missions. It's clear that the developers have put some great effort in the writing. Ever wondered why the Geths are in war with everybody else? The reasons are revealed inside the story. Wondered what happened to your old crew? Those who survived can be found and even talked to. The last sentence leads to the next thing about the story.

In Mass Effect 2, most of the major decisions you made in the first game has an affect. Managed to save Wrex? Well, you can find and even talk to him! Did Wrex got killed? You can not find him but the others of his clan will question the reasons why it happened.
To actually see the full effect of you decisions in the first game, that is if you ever played it, requires you to import character. If you do not have such character, then the game makes the decisions for you. And this is my first real complain. I had Mass Effect in XBox, which means I can not import my old character to the sequel, or at least I have not find out how to do that. This means my only option is to create new character, and thus I have no power over the decisions of the first game, even though I know exactly what happened and which would have been my decisions. So, I'm forced to live with decisions I probably won't had made. The developers could have added the possibility to make those important decision during the character generation, especially because there was short section where your memories were checked to see if it was really the real Shepard the Cerberus brought back. It could have been quite easy to include the decisions in that section.

Quests

The quests are the one of the weakest part of the game, in fact the only thing made worse is the resource gathering, which I will discuss later. The quests are more or less quarantined running through areas from sector A to B, then point C and perhaps back to point A. While travelling between the points the game gives you either a fight, which you must clear to proceed, boring travelling to the forward or cutscene which moves the story. At times the cycle is interrupted with running from NPC to another gathering information, but eventually player ends up running that small pipe, fighting hordes of enemies and watching the cutscene. So, the quests are too much the same. There are, luckily, few quests and missions with diverse style. For example, one quests requires you to follow two NPCs walking in Citadel while you are moving along the maintance ledges above. You must not lose the sight of the characters for too long or the mission is over, and the result is something not desired. Another quests requires you to find certain computers, hack them, then located the correct second device in time with the help of distance meter, showing only how close/far you are from the second device. Sadly, the quests like those two are rare.

Second complaining about the quests are the amount of those. There is just so few quests, especially when considering the size of the world. And most of the small side quests are concentrated on few specific planets or stations, causing most of the planets being empty and only source of resources. This is very bad flaw especially because most of the minor quests are very short, without any continuation.

Lastly, most of the quests suffers from the End Quest -screen I mentioned in the story section. As each major quest are handled separately, after you complete one quest you are telepored back to Normandy, forcing the player to re-enter planet or station again to finish any remaining quest there. This gets especially irritating in cases where the player has several major quests in same area, causing lots of waiting due the loading of area just because of the teleportation back to Normandy. Few times the game offers the possibility to wait before moving back to Normandy, but those times it's just for searching the area for any salvage or ammo and when you are done, back to Normandy.

Gameplay

Mass Effect 2 has suffered some heavy dumping down from the developers. In the first game you were able to find hundreds of weapons, which you the assigned to you squad members and sold the rest. In ME2, you don't find weapons but research and find the models, after which you have done all the crew member are able to use them if they fit to their weapon type limitations. So, you don't have to find several different weapons of the same model, just one is enough and then all the members have access to it. Also, the sheer number of weapons has been reduced, making it easier to equip the squad properly. Also, the modifications has been removed, replaced by few certain biotic skills. So no more wondering which mods would fit better to each mission.
The equipment has suffered another dumping down; when you find new weapon, it's more or less certain that it's far better than any previous weapon you had. There are two cases where player may want to reconsider whether the latest weapon is the best; snipers and heavy weapons. In case of sniper rifles the choosing goes to power versus amount of ammo. One sniper rifle has more or less certain kill with one shot while having only ten rounds, other riffle has worse damage but contains up to sixty rounds. In case of heavy weapons, the difference can be found from the type of shot. Easily controlled, continuous beam, seeking rockets or grenades? Heavy weapons is also the only group which contain totally useless weapon: M-920 Cain. I tried it several occasions, and I saw no effect on the enemies. Purpose of it? I don't honestly know. I would rather stick with other weapons.

The biotic skills have suffered dumping down as well. There are not so many of them anymore, and all the hacking and lockpicking skills have been removed. The only remotely useful skills are the ones that affect the type of shots your weapon releases, and even those are not required to finish the game. So, in Mass Effect 2 I formed my squad solely basing on the character dialogies and type of weapons they can use.

Character interaction has been improved a bit. The morality choices are still there, but the game also presents method of interacting the dialogue with pressing mouse button at the specific moments, indicated in screen. This mouse clicking, left button for renegade and right button for paragon, causes certain special event to happen, usually resolving the situation either paragon or renegade way. The system itself is fun, but there is still one complain about it: As only either paragon or renegade interaction is presented on certain situation, I can use paragon far less the renegade, as most of the interactions are the later. Thus, if you want to play mister Nice-Guy, you have far less options for these cinematic interferences than if you used renegade choices as well. It's also very easy to miss the opportunity if you look away from screen even for a moment during dialogues, but I think that works as it should. Most of the discussions are actually interesting and fun, with well done voice-acting. For example the discussions with the Salarian scientist Mordin are fascinating, accompanied by his nearly hypnotic voice.

Staying alive in ME2 is very easy, as you begin regenerating health as soon as you get behind cover. This and the fact that your squad mates recover even from death right after the battle has ended makes the omni-gel mostly useless, though there are few tight spots where you actually need it. And even if you happen to die, you most probably won't have to restart too far away, as the game autosaves very regularly, even before you encounter new battle. So no much replaying has to be done.

The research system is well implemented, allowing you to decide what you want and when. You can buy new technologies to research from shops or find while doing quests. But again there are few flaws. First of all, few of the upgrades to Normandy seems to be with no use. For example, I did not find any use for weapon upgrade for Normandy. I suspect that some of those "apparently unimportant" upgrades affect the ending mission of the game, especially to survival of the crew. But unless I play the game again without those upgrades I can not be sure.
Second flaw of the research system comes in forms of the resources needed. Well, the flaw is not actually in researching but the methods you must use to gather the minerals. Some you can find from quests, but majority must be found from planets by using scanner and probes. The scanning is done by holding right mouse button down and moving the mouse around the surface of the planet. If the scanner detects minerals it begins making noise, the type of noise telling which mineral you have found and the volume the amount of minerals found. At the same time small frame in the top right reveals the same information visually. When you have found minerals you launch a probe with left mouse button, collecting the minerals to you. Then you must find another mineral spot in the planet, or if depleted, from another planet. To collect enough minerals to get even half of the researches you must spend hours doing the scanning, which is boring and stupid. Very big flaw from developers, I hope this one gets removed from the third game.

Anything else?

There are few annoying bugs in ME2. First one is that some quests never got removed from the active quests -list, making me to recheck the time and time again just to remember that I already finished them. Not a game breaking, but still annoying. Second bug is more game breaking like, as at times the character begins floating around, restricting the movement to the areas normally considered as walling objects and which height is same as the distance between Shepard's feet and ground. There is no way to recover for this bug but to reload the last save, as there was no way to return on the ground. What causes this bug is unknown to me. Luckily, due the regularity of autosaving, I was never forced to replay much.

Score

The game has it's moments, the story and character interaction is very well done, but not enough to carry over the flaws and mistakes. The dumbing down has just been too heavy for my liking, and the stupid design brainfarts like planet scanning lowers the score greatly. If you like Mass Effect, and you are planning to see how the story ends in ME3, then I suggest you to buy this game. Otherwise, there are many other games which are far better than this.

My score system: 6/10
GB score system: 3/5