GB Feature: Mass Effect 2 Review
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The missions in the game are almost exclusively combat-oriented. While in Mass Effect you had to talk to people and solve puzzles and make weighty decisions, in Mass Effect 2 you mostly just kill stuff, and sometimes the missions don't feel like anything more than extended shooting galleries. In most cases, you enter a large room with lots of objects to take cover behind, you kill about ten guys, you scrounge around for bullets and resources, and then you move on to the next big room and repeat the process. There are some role-playing elements here and there, but BioWare abandoned puzzles completely, and I'm guessing that Mass Effect 2 only has about half the dialogue as Mass Effect. The emphasis is clearly on combat.
BioWare even streamlined the equipment. Mass Effect had way too much useless equipment, and you'd find it way too often, but in Mass Effect 2 BioWare did a complete 180 and almost removed equipment entirely. For example, in Mass Effect there were over 250 weapons, and you could pick and choose which upgrades to put into them, giving you all sorts of options for how you wanted to kill people. In Mass Effect 2, despite BioWare adding in two new classes of weapons (submachine guns and heavy weapons), there are only 21 weapons total, and the upgrades are much more generalized (they mostly just increase the damage or accuracy of a class of weapons). That means your inventory is a non-factor in the game, and there isn't even an inventory page. You just have to visit a weapons or armor locker at the rare moments when you want to change what you're using.
