Mass Effect 2

So Mass Effect 2 came out on the 26th. I got it at a midnight launch and played it until 6:00 am. I have since been playing it at least 2 or 3 hours a day. Suffice to say… I like it.

I found the first Mass Effect pretty addictive too, which is strange because I don’t really like sci-fi, especially Star Trek-esque space operas. And that’s exactly what Mass Effect is. And yet these games suck me right in, it helps that you can design and direct your own Commander Shepard, getting to pretty much decide who this person is. And I have to say when I got to see my Shepard again (because you can import your ME1 character) I was elated. I guess I got pretty attached to her over the course of the first game, and she hasn’t changed. She’s still a Vanguard and still a crazily equal mix of Paragon and Renegade.

That’s right, the primary system of deciding who your Commander Shepard is and how the people of the Mass Effect world react to him/her is still intact. Though I found I had dialog options based on my Paragon and Renegade rankings pretty early on. Besides responses and choices that determine these rankings you also get actions in the middle of dialogs you can preform, interrupting the character who is talking to you to by preforming a Paragon action with the left trigger or a Renegade action with the right trigger when the option flashes.

Those aren’t the only things that have changed. You can once again mine planets for precious materials, only this time you don’t have to land on the planet and wrestle with unwieldy Mako controls and the materials actually serve a purpose. At first I was a little put off that there were no level ups for gun skills or upgrades to attach to your weapons, but now you can use mined materials to research and create upgrade schematics you find, a better and much more interesting system. You also need to gain certain squad members to use features like this aboard the ship.  And this not only goes for weapons but areas of your ship, omni-tools, cybernetics and armor.

Speaking of armor, it’s modular this time around. You can swap around individual chest plates, helmets, leg guards, arms, etc. with various bonuses on them to create your own armor. You can also choose the pattern and colors, which is a welcome addition considering that in the last game you were often stuck in ugly yellow armor for 10 hours because it was the best one you could find. You can also choose Shepard’s casual outfit that he/she will wear aboard the Normandy.

Mass Effect 1 always struck me as cinematic, but Mass Effect 2 takes that to a different level. The aesthetics, the camera angles used during dialogs, everything has been amped up. Though like Tycho said over at Penny Arcade, the levels sometimes seem a bit too designed. From a gameplay angle this is a good thing as it’s much easier to take advantage of the cover system (and you’ll need to, they’ve really emphasized the “Shooter” in RPG Shooter this time), but it can be a bit distracting at times. The story structure also seems a bit more tight, more unified to me. You answer basically to the equivilant of an intergalactic Cancer Man, and he’s an interesting device to structure the story around, tie events together and inject a bit of mystery all in one.

You don’t get the same squad as in the first game (on account of everyone thinking Shepard was dead for 2 years, long story, play the damn game)  but familiar faces keep finding you which is a nice touch. Also it doesn’t bother me because, sliiight spoiler, my absolute favorite squad member Garrus returns. I won’t tell you where you find him, but I will say when I was hunting down a particular character and they mentioned he was a Turian I just kept saying “please be Garrus, please be Garrus” over and over until I found him.

So far I haven’t managed to relocate Liara, who was my Shepard’s lover (seeing as she was the only choice for lesbian!Sheps) and despite finding her to be insufferably dull in the first game (though, admittedly, more appealing than Ashley. Didn’t miss anything there, I let her blow up) I’m so attached to my Shepard that I’ve become eager to track her down by association. On  the other hand, lesbian!Sheps can at least romance a female human this time (albeit bisexual and… er… panaliensexual? Why do we only get chicks who swing both ways?) , though I’m a little perturbed that the mega-butch, full-body-tattooed female named Jack isn’t available for girl on girl.

I mean really? And once again I might note that you can’t have a gay male!Shep. Come on Bioware, stop pussing out. You let our male characters have a roll in the hay with a dude elf in Dragon Age. Though, again, a bisexual dude elf (is it really that hard to depict full-on gayness guys?) Though according to some it’s not gay if it’s an elf.

Anyway, enough about gay gamer issues, how does the game hold up? Very well, I think. Though I’ve heard some complaints about the ending I’ve yet to get there, I’m a sidequest junkie and would like to make my experience last. Not to mention the game is so massive it’s stored on two discs.

This isn’t a sequel you can dive into without playing the first one, though apparently when creating a new character you can check off key decisions from the first game and see the results in Mass Effect 2. And you can only import your Mass Effect 1 character if you beat the first game.  Going through this epic with a legacy character is very satisfying and I think with a character you’ve designed and characterized yourself you just get drawn in all the more intensely.

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