Mass Effect 2 Review Page 2

26 Jan 2010 at 11:44:14 by Tim McDonald
Systems used to review this title: (PC)

The good should be obvious. Everything feels slicker and quicker; the entire game is more fluid, and this extends to all aspect, but – again – combat is the poster child. It's now a genuine visceral joy, with headshots resulting in gigantic blood splatters or huge robot-centric explosions, and killing something big and mean makes you feel like a scary badass, rather than someone capable of wrestling with slightly awkward controls. Combat is now, essentially, a very good example of a third-person shooter. The bad is that this comes at the expense of any obvious form of complexity. Levelling no longer gives you myriad options to choose from – each character now has one for each ability and a more general class-based stat that tends to increase health, damage, and maybe cooldowns. Your Charm and Intimidate abilities, which grant you extra choices in conversation, no longer have stats of their own – they're tied to your Paragon and Renegade karma meters. Don't expect to amass a gigantic arsenal of weapons and armour and pore over whether five extra damage per shot is worth losing three shots in your clip, because across each weapon class there are maybe four or five weapons total in the game, and finding one immediately gives you enough of them for your squad. It's all down to making everything simpler, more streamlined, and more immediate.

It's certainly going to be good for those who don't like overcomplicated RPGs, but my initial reaction to this stuff was nothing but negative. I want to agonise over +1 damage decisions, dammit; utterly pointless min-maxing is part of the reason I play RPGs. When the game begins to really open up and you get access to more systems, more sidequests, and more uncharted worlds, though, this pales into the insignificance it deserves. The bad, it transpires, isn't actually bad. It's just that the focus has shifted away from where I thought it would be.

The effort you'd put into deciding on your weapons loadout is instead corralled into upgrades on your ship's new Research Station. As the game proceeds, you can purchase upgrades from shops or research them on the ship, with schematics becoming available from scanning technology on missions or simply talking to your crew members. Ramifications are both big and small; the minerals required for research are a pain to get through the new and dull planetary scanning system (no driving sections this time, which is bound to disappoint someone) and as such deciding to spend 20,000 Iridium on +20% damage to a weapon type is a big decision in terms of the effort those resources took to gather, even though it's for relatively small gain. There are bigger ramifications in that a few of these research projects scream “big, game-altering decision,” like the ones that fit new cannons or shields to your ship. Are they big, game-altering decisions? That would be telling.

Speaking of big, game-altering decisions, Mass Effect 2 is fairly heavily changed by your approaches in the first game; if you made a particular galaxy-spanning choice or left a character to die there'll be an impact, and plenty of choices you may have forgotten about will come back and bite you in the arse. Considering one of the loading screen warnings mentions dire ramifications of decisions made when Mass Effect 3 comes around, and some of the horrible, gut-emptying feelings I got when I realised exactly what my best intentions wrought during this second game, I'm going to be terrified to import my save come the third game. The moment of genius with these moral decisions comes with the snap Paragon/Renegade trigger pulls during cutscenes; these can be as simple as the one demoed back at E3 which has Shepard push a guard out of a window, or they can be as dramatic as pushing a character out of the way of a fatal shot. You're forced to decide, very quickly, on what you want to do in that situation before the cutscene ends, or things will unfold without your interference. Again, the amazing scenes these take place in, the natural dialogue that flows during them, and the genuine emotions forcibly torn from you when a decision you made has unexpected consequences all draw you further and further in.

So you fly around the galaxy, scooping up minerals, meeting interesting people and either recruiting them or murdering them, slowly piecing together what's going on, exploring uncharted worlds and doing some improved side missions on them, and having a whale of a time while doing it because the whole game is so well made. Certainly, there are elements that don't sit quite right – I'm not happy about the immersion-breaching Mission Complete screens which make it very clear that you've just taken part in a “level,” rather than explored somewhere new and done things as you fancied, although towards the end I began to appreciate the summaries giving me a view of what transpired from the perspective of shadowy string-puller The Illusive Man. The hubs, too, feel like hubs, being very clearly divided into areas with combat and no combat, but these are all minor niggles. In the end, I'm taken aback at how much of an improvement Mass Effect 2 is on the first game.

All ...

Comment