Game: Mass Effect 2

     Developer: BioWare

     Publisher: Electronic Arts

     Genre: Third-Person Shooter/RPG

     Platforms: Xbox 360, PC

     Score: 9.0

          This has been a really hard review for me to write, and I’ve finally just decided to just start and see what comes out. First off, let me just say that Mass Effect 2 is a really good game. It is not, however, a flawless game. But first, for any of you who have been living under a metaphorical rock, I’ll do the obligatory game description and plot summary.

     Mass Effect 2 is a RPG/Third-Person Shooter hybrid by BioWare, who are known for Star Wars RPG Knights of the Old Republic. The first Mass Effect was BioWare’s effort to create their own Sci-Fi universe to play around with, and they were VERY succesful at it. Mass Effect’s universe is one of the most immersive and original that I’ve come across in a good while, and I think that it has as many possibilities as the Star Wars universe, except that BioWare won’t have to deal with LucasArts whenever they want to do anything (bring it on, Star Wars nerds). Mass Effect 2 picks up where the first entry left off, which will be different depending on whether you choose to import your character and save from the first game, or start with the default story in ME2. I won’t go into much detail about the story, because there is a pretty significant surprise right at the beginning, if you haven’t already had it spoiled for you. Just take my word for it that ME2′s story is definately on par with the first. The story is certainly one of the great strengths of Mass Effect, and the dialogue is especially well written, with a lot of options and different conversation trees. The voice acting is REALLY good all around, and there are some VERY funny background conversations that will have you standing in one place for ten minutes just to hear the whole thing.

     The gameplay of Mass Effect 2 is a little less top of the line. It is certainly not bad, and the game controls better than many, but it doesn’t stand out on its own. The gameplay is pretty straighforward Third-Person Shooter fare, with solid cover mechanics and RPG elements. You choose a class in the beginning of the game, and you are able to allot skill points in certain skills throughout the game, as you level up. There is also a Morality system, which rewards you with Renegade or Paragon points, depending on your decisions and conversation choices. You can also upgrade weapons, etc, etc. Really nothing special in this department, although I did have some complaints.

     Ah, and here we are. The complaints. This is the part of the review that I’ve really been wrestling with for the last week, because there are a lot of really small complaints that I have about this game. They don’t really take away much from the overall greatness of the game, but they keep it from being as epic as it could be. Also, some of the complaints that I have are about changes from the first game, so you may have totally different feelings about some of this, and that’s okay because I’m writing this review, not you. Go get your own blog… Anyway, I’ll get started with my list of (mostly) petty complaints about Mass Effect 2. First, I have a not so petty complaint about the weapons in this game. In the first Mass Effect, I remember there being TONS of weapons. You found them all the time, and you could add all sorts of mods to all of them, and your armor as well. Now, I love games with lots of weapons (I REALLY loved Borderlands). I like picking up tons of guns and sorting though them to see if any of them are better than the one I’ve got. I love selling 30 random weapons that are of NO use to me back to a store, and getting money for a slightly better gun. Maybe I’m just a packrat, or maybe I’m crazy. I don’t know. But I liked all of the different weapon types and brands in Mass Effect 1. However, there were a lot of (perfectly understandable) complaints about the menus being slow and clunky(and generally frustrating) in the first Mass Effect. BioWare’s answer to these complaints, however, was not to streamline the menus and weapon management. Instead, they just took out the whole loot system completely. No more finding weapons dropped by dead enemies or in random boxes. In Mass Effect 2, you get (maybe) three or four different weapons in each weapon type throughout the entire game. Now you may not care about this, but it was a real disappointment for me.

     Another pretty major complaint I had is about the game’s font size. I realize that a lot of people have HDTV’s but I don’t, and I know I’m not the only one. However, Mass Effect 2 joins the ranks of games with tiny, miniscule, indecipherable text on anything other than an HDTV (I’m looking at you, Dead Rising). I actually had to play the whole game sitting in a chair about three feet from my tv, just so I could read the subtitles, mission text, and pretty much any other text in the game. This is incredibly frustrating! I’m sure that the developers and testers were playing Mass Effect in HD, and I don’t blame them. The game was gorgeous even in standard def. But get a clue! Not every gamer can shell out the money for an HDTV, and those of us who can’t would really like to be able to play games without going blind from eyestrain…

       I also really missed the MAKO vehicle from the first game. Now I have a feeling I really am alone there, but I actually enjoyed the vehicle sections in Mass Effect 1, and although there certainly were problems that needed to be addressed, completely doing away with that part of the game seems like a strange solution. My last real complaint about the game has to do with the game’s most important feature - the dialogue. Mass Effect (and BioWare games in general) are known for their excellent dialogue system. In Mass Effect 2, you can skip to the next part of a dialogue scene with the X button. This might not matter, but I always, always, ALWAYS have subtitles on (unless I’m playing Army of Two), especially in games with as much emphasis on dialogue, and I am a very quick reader. So I’ve usually finished reading the line the character is saying a good while before they finish saying it, so I used that skip button a lot to speed things up. The problem is, the X button also picks the default answer during conversations, or exits the conversation altogether. I can’t tell you how many times I accidentally picked the wrong response with an ill timed press of the X button, and a few times, mostly in conversations where I wanted to get the most Renegade points possible, I had to restart from my last save…

     Even with these complaints, however, Mass Effect 2 is a VERY good game. It has an epic storyline and some of the best dialogue in the industry. The gameplay really is very solid, and there is a lot of opportunity for replay value, with branching storylines and Paragon and Renegade choices. I know I complained a lot about this game, but this is only because I enjoyed it so much that the few flaws it had really stuck with me. In the end, despite my complaints, Mass Effect is another excellent installment in an epic series from BioWare.

(Thanks for reading, please feel free to comment and let me know what you think. I realized when I started writing this, that all three of the games I’ve reviewed so far have been EA games. Therefore, I would like to assure everyone reading this that I am NOT being paid by EA, and that it isn’t my fault that they put out all of the games I’ve played so far this year. If it makes you feel any better, my next review will be on Bioshock 2, which is published by 2k Games.)

Advertisement