Thoughts About Mass Effect 2 [Review]

I’m not breaking any new ground by loving Mass Effect 2; to the contrary I’m merely joining in with everyone else who’s ever played the game by typing in bold: Mass Effect 2 is a MASTERPIECE of a game. For the first time ever, I actually felt like standing and applauding when the game was complete. You can think less of me if you will, but I’ve yet to play a game that captured my full attention the way it did.

What The Game Did Right

Mass Effect 2 let me continue the narrative of Mass Effect as the character I created.

By allowing me to import my character — complete with my personal customizations, and decisions — from the first Mass Effect, the game really took a step immersing yourself in the writers world. I loved the first Mass Effect enough to really take my time and put some TLC into the digitized version of myself and think before making potential game changing decisions. This made it feel like I was picking up right where I had left off; that I was continuing the narrative of ‘Commander Paul Shepherd’. Sequels try to do this all the time, but without the personal customization, I’ve yet to play one that gets to this level.

Mass Effect 2 was full of characters I actually ended up caring about.

My Avatar in some fancy Mass Effect armor

Anyone in Hollywood will tell you, to make a successfully movie, you need to have the audience connect with the characters on some level. Much to the credit of the game’s writers, Mass Effect 2 successfully creates that connection. The characters are interesting, their lines are well written, and the voice acting is far from phoned in. I enjoyed the conversation elements of the game just as much, and sometimes more, than the combat.

Sadly only two of the characters from the last Mass Effect will actually sign up to your team — Garrus Vakarian and Tali’Zorah nar Rayya. But there are “cameo” appearances made by almost everybody you met in the first game.

Your decisions matter.

Every action you make in the game has some determining factor on the crew you meet. The conversations you have, and the action you take on the battlefield impacts your crew’s loyalty, their impression of you, and can even determine if they live or die. Being the eternal boy scout, I needed to make sure my entire crew survived the whole ordeal. I couldn’t live with myself knowing that a bad decision I made cause one of my digital crewmen to lose their life. This was not as easy as it sounds.

To take this a step further, it’s been announced that the decisions you made in Mass Effect 2 will carry over into Mass Effect 3. This meant that I had to play through the last level of the game again. At the last minute, I made a questionable decision to hand over powerful technology to a shady organization — a decision I knew I shouldn’t have made. I bugged me so much, I had to load a previous save, reply the last mission and made a different choice. I didn’t want that coming back to bite me in the next game.

Room For Improvement.

Though the game got very little wrong, there were a couple of areas where I saw need for improvement.

1. Once you’ve taken your relationship with any given character to a certain point, all they do is repeat the last conversation you had. I know that it simply isn’t technologically possible to have endless conversation with non-existence people, but something other than the last conversation topic should be an option. Have the characters play cards or something.

2. Though the combat is greatly improved from the last game, it still felt like something was missing. Ejecting ‘thermal clips’ from your weapons to keep them from over heating is just about as fun as it sounds.

3. At least for me, the difficulty seemed unbalanced. Playing the game on the normal setting made it way too easy, yet setting the difficulty up a notch to hard made it impossibly hard for me. This frustrates me. I’m a busy guy and only get so much time a day to play games. I like my games to be challenging, but not to the point where the fun is taken out of playing.

4. Ashley Williams. I sacrificed a good crew man in order to save her in the fist game and she and my character ended up falling in love. After not seeing her for two years (the time between the first and second game) the course of the game finally has you meet up with her again… and she get mad at you? No tears shed? No hugs? No love? And then just quickly as she appears, she’s gone. I was expecting more.

Those few items are hardly enough to discredit the game by any means. In my mind they are so insignificant that they aren’t even going to effect my score. My finally score for Mass Effect 2 is a perfect 10/10.

Thane and Grunt Pack A Punch