Review: Mass Effect 2

Never Let It Be Said That BioWare Doesn’t Listen

Last year, I played Mass Effect. It was pretty much destined to be a good game due to the tried-and-true BioWare formula: fantastic writing wrapped around a pretty good game engine for everything else.

There were a few things that annoyed me about the first game, most notably the strange and unwieldy inventory system. You had a lot of different weapons and they all had upgraded versions marked with Roman numerals (a MkIII shotgun was better than a MkII etc.) and you got sufficiently many of these that you would literally have to clean out your inventory every 10 missions. This was a pain. A large part of the game was flying to other worlds and cruising around in a moon buggy with a big gun on it. This part was a personal favorite of mine (it turned on my inner 8-year-old’s ‘wheeeeee I love outer space!!’ mode), but there were a lot of people that hated the buggy.

BioWare clearly decided to listen to user feedback on the sequel, though I don’t know that it made the game better for it. Let’s start with the positives. The inventory system was pretty much completely gutted and massively simplified. Now you find or build a weapon once, and anybody who has proficiency in that weapon type can automatically use it. If your main character can’t use a particular weapon type at the start of the game, there are opportunities to change that later. This is especially great if, like me, you didn’t know how amazing the sniper rifle is. You can use minerals you’ve collected to upgrade these weapons, as well as your armor, abilities, and the ship (which is REALLY important if you want a non-depressing ending). At the end of the day, all this is way more streamlined, and now managing your stuff doesn’t get in the way of the good stuff anymore. The combat gameplay is also much improved, and now it’s a lot more cover-based.

Now for the bad stuff. My beloved moon buggy is gone. You don’t get to roam around planets and shoot stuff with your big huge gun and make sweet jumps over craters anymore. This makes me very sad, but the rest of the game is good enough that I can forgive this. The new mining mini-game, though, is soul-crushingly awful. In the first game, mining consisted of going to planets and pressing a “scan” button. It was kind of like those when you see instructions hand dryers in public restrooms that have been vandalized and changed to read “PUSH BUTTON – RECEIVE BACON” – but you got minerals instead. This somewhat boring system was replaced by having to run a little targeting reticle incredibly slowly over the entire surface of a planet, and launching a probe when you detected minerals. Scanning an entire planet is quite literally a 10 minute process, and you’ll want to be scanning the whole galaxy full of them if you want enough minerals to trick out all your stuff. You can buy a ship upgrade that can speed your scans up this somewhat, but it is still a frustrating waste of a VERY large amount of time. I kept falling asleep on the couch while mining, and when I would wake up and see the mining screen still on my TV, I had to fight the urge to throw my controller at the screen. (I am grumpy when I wake up.) I’m Commander Shepard, dammit. I have lots of people on my ship that can do this crap for me. Or have Tali’Zorah write a super complex program that makes the reticle go up and down and fire a probe when it finds something. It’s called COMPUTER SCIENCE. Perhaps it is a lost art that died with the Protheans?

The Crunch And The Fluff

The “running around and killing stuff” portion of the game has also been streamlined, and now combat relies much more heavily on using cover. So much so, in fact, that it’s almost too obvious. If you see a bunch of waist-high stuff lying around, you can pretty much bet at least one bullet is about to try to make sweet love to your head. For some reason, a lot of your powers won’t work on enemies that are shielded in some way – and there are three separate types of shields that require different methods to take down efficiently. This means you’ll have to make educated guesses on who you’ll be fighting, and make educated guesses as to what party members to bring to have the right mix of countermeasures. On the “Normal” level of difficulty, I found the fighting to be a little bit easy, but still exciting enough that I never got bored. There are “boss” characters in most areas, but usually it’s just somebody with a little extra shielding that you can hear calling out some variation on “Space feces! It is Shepard! Kill him or her!” Several “boss” areas consist of defeating waves of opponents. There are a couple fights where they throw something ginormous and unexpected at you, and these battles are not very hard either. Though I haven’t played them, I suspect playing on higher difficulty levels would be more frustrating rather than fun because the only real ways to scale the difficulty are to add more guys (of which there are many already) or to make the AI cheat more. Overall, I found the combat fun but mediocre.

That being said, if you come into a BioWare game for anything but the writing, you’re missing the point. This game, like all its well-written brothers and sisters, has great character development and a plot that doesn’t bother waiting around with its twists. You’re put at odds with some of the people you met in ME1 right out of the gate, and I found many of these omg uncomfortable moments more exciting than getting shot at. You also get to decide the outcome of a few events from the first game by “remembering” events via a teammate asking you how they transpired. I forgot a few names from the first game and wound up with a complete asshole ruling the Council. Oops. Sorry about that, humanity. Martin Short Sheen plays the Illusive Man, your boss for this game (well, sort of), and the performance makes you feel like you’re in a deliciously old sci-fi movie from the late 60’s or early 70’s. He sits in a director’s chair and smokes while plotting humanity’s total domination of the galaxy, and he’s got an awesome view of a closeby star to help him think just because he CAN. Just like the first game, you have to go find and convince most of your team to join you. However, every last one of them has some sort of personal problem they need your help with. In the story, helping them frees their mind so they can focus on the mission. A little hokey, but their subplots are all so good I got over it fast. Even if you don’t care about any of that (and if you don’t, why the hell are you playing a BioWare game?!), you need to complete these quests for your crew because doing so unlocks their SECRET POWER. That’s right, they each learn to do something new once they’re loyal. Again, a little hokey, but I got over that really fast when I started capping people in the dome with WARP BULLETS. Additionally, you will need to have most (if not all) of your crew loyal if you intend to get an ending that doesn’t depress you.

SPOILER-FREE ADVICE ON GETTING A GOOD ENDING:

1. Get your entire crew loyal.
2. When it’s time to do the last mission (you’ll know) do it IMMEDIATELY.
3. Don’t leave people who don’t usually run around and shoot things with you to fend for themselves.
4. Pick the right people for the right job.
5. Upgrade your ship fully (you can leave the med-bay out, though).

Ignore this advice, and live with the guilt forevermore (or until you do another playthrough of the end like I had to).

The Most Important Part Of The Game

There is one more very important element to this game, and I think you all know what it is. WANG. DANG. SPACE POONTANG. I was a little disappointed in the sex scenes in this game on a couple fronts. I played Dude Shepard, so I cannot vouch for the level of titillation the sex scenes for anybody but the female crew. Unfortunately, both Mass Effect games are unlike Dragon Age in that the space-booty you have locked your reproductive torpedoes onto keeps its shields up until the end of the game, right before you go on your final mission. I’m not sure if this is how they handle birth control in the future, or what. Dragon Age was much kinder in this respect. It was kind of nice to sleep with Leliana about a third of the way into the game, and then hook up with Morrigan and carry that guilt with me all the way to the Battle of Denerim. However, Mass Effect 2 does take one unfortunate cue from Dragon Age in that the sex scenes tend to feature an awful damned lot of clothing during the long-awaited galacticoitus. Did someone delete all the 3D models for nipples at BioWare? Is that why everyone is wearing a bra, a snuggie, burlap, or a full environment suit?

SPACE-CONCLUSION

Overall, the things I loved about this game vastly outnumbered the things I didn’t and shot them in the face with warp bullets. It’s not the best shooter you’ve ever played. It’s not the best RPG you’ve ever played. Hell, it might not even be the best BioWare RPG you’ve ever played. But it is a very tasty blend of a lot of different things, and it all works out into a great game that I can happily recommend. I just wish they’d left out the stupid mining part and gave me a little galactic sideboob.