Review: Mass Effect 2

This will be my first entry here in a long series of mostly RPG-related articles. I was planning to open up with a review of the RPG genre as a whole and how to define it, but that is taking so long that I’ll have to put it on haitus. A Mass Effect 2 review is already late enough as it is. So here we go…

Get ready for a long review.

WHY TO GET IT ON PC

Mass Effect 2 is available on Xbox 360 and PC. If you played the original Mass Effect on the 360, you probably know that the inventory management was head-bashingly annoying. You had to hold down that little mushroom stick for all its worth to scroll to the bottom of your list of weapons just so you could sell the one on the bottom, then it would jump to the top and you’d have to do it all over again to sell the next one. The PC rectified this somewhat thanks to little tricks like a scrollbar and the mouse. Those problems are gone on both platforms in ME2, and I don’t know of any specific examples in this game since I don’t have the 360 version this time, but if nothing else there’s mouse aiming. Since ME2 now lets you aim for different body parts (headshots, blowing arms off robots, etc.), being able to aim well is important. Finally, one really neat feature on the PC is the fact that it gives you a “code” for each unique Shepard face you generate, which you can save or share with others, in order to recreate that exact face.

There’s already a website for it: http://www.masseffect2faces.com/ Also, if you’re on the PC and haven’t played through the first game (even though you really, really should), there’s a site for save games too: http://www.masseffectsaves.com/ Pretty awesome.

Of course there are the usual high-resolution graphics advantages (all screenshots below are in 1920×1200 when enlarged), but in other places the PC version seems to have been short-changed more than it was with BioWare’s other recent game, Dragon Age. All DLC is also available on PC, but Dragon Age let you share character info and achievements through the BioWare social network, where ME2 does not. Maybe you can do it through Microsoft’s Live system somehow, but I’m not sure. There is also no real modding community at present, so overall there are more advantages to getting Dragon Age on PC than ME2. I recently picked up the 360 version too, so I may have more differences to report later.

GRAPHICS

We’ve gotten to the point where it takes a lot to make me criticize a game’s graphics. It usually boils down to whether or not I like the art style, and I absolutely love Mass Effect’s art style. I’m not crazy about the “gritty realistic future” set in a drab grey and brown post-apocalyptic dystopia, and thankfully Mass Effect is anything BUT that. The world of Mass Effect is sleek, stylish, futuristic, clean, sharp, and awesome. If you liked JJ Abrams’s vision of Star Trek, well, that’s similar to what ME looks like, right down to the lens flares. It’s bright and colorful enough to be pleasant, but has enough dark corners and grit to keep the tone serious, especially if you leave “film grain” turned on. In a way, the film grain effect is like choosing your own atmosphere. I tried leaving it on through about half the game, then I turned it off, putting the game in slick and shiny mode, and never looked back. Thank God it’s an option. Everything should be optional.

That’s really all I have to say about graphics. Some people might jump into the game and criticize the fact that not everything is as meticulously bump-mapped or has as many surfaces as the latest and greatest engines, but I don’t even understand where they’re coming from. Mass Effect looks great to me, but then, I would play it even if it was 2-D isometric with a resolution of 800×600, so maybe you should just look at the screenshots and form your own opinion. All I can say is the art style is superb and the environments look like sci-fi paintings most of the time, so no complaints here.

GAMEPLAY

The gameplay of the original Mass Effect has been vastly streamlined and improved. BioWare made the drastic choice to remove ALL inventory management from the game completely. No more going to the shop and scrolling through your whole list of assault rifles to sell the worst ones (which usually  meant all but the one you were currently using). No more “your inventory is almost full, delete some stuff” warning. No more getting infinite money halfway through the game but then never using it to buy anything at all. No more omni-gel! Instead, ME2 gives you the option to customize your armor’s color and appearance on the Normandy and occasionally install upgrades to your weapons, but that’s it. It works wonderfully; the upgrades sold by shops are ALL relatively useful, you’re never TOO rich, and you’re never distracted by full inventory warnings while in the thick of combat.

Speaking of combat, a lot of tight-pants reviewers are still claiming that BioWare doesn’t know how to do this whole shooter thing. They must have played a totally different game than me, because ME2 seems to fix nearly all of the major combat issues of ME1. Even the weapons are more varied, forcing you to choose between guns that are hard-hitting and guns with a high rate-of-fire. You also get to pick one heavy weapon to bring before each battle, choosing between such classics as flamethrowers and nuke-launchers along with a few new things like that useless freeze-bomb gun. Enemies react to gunshots like they’ve actually been hit, where you hit them is now important (yes, “boom headshot” – there’s actually a character who says that sometimes), and the fact that you now have a limited ammo supply and have to reload means that it plays much more like other third-person cover-based shooters.

There are downsides to this, however. You can always spot an upcoming fight when a room is full of boxes or short walls (aka convenient cover). And then there’s that popular new thing where you heal yourself just by hiding for a few seconds. The first Mass Effect had shields, abut it also had a health bar under those shields that you had to replenish with medkits. Now it’s like this: once your shields are gone, your guy panics and starts screaming and his vision goes red, and he runs away to hide. Then once he calms down, he remembers that apparently every modern video game hero, from Commander Shepard to Nathan Drake, has self-healing wounds. To quote Stryker in X-Men 2, “I used to think you were one of a kind, Wolverine… I was wrong.” I have mixed feelings about this gameplay mechanic, but yeah, it does streamline things. Your supply of Medigel is now used to resurrect fallen comrades, not to replenish their health bars.

Speaking of companions, both your companions and your enemies are at least a LITTLE brighter now, hiding behind cover and moving around occasionally. However, I highly recommend setting your companion AI to “don’t do anything unless I say so” and giving all of the orders yourself. They like to vault over cover into a shower of bullets and generally get themselves killed a lot unless you point behind a box and say “STAY!” like they’re a naughty puppy. Their bullets are not as strong as their powers anyway, and you can always order them to use their powers as long as they’re alive, even if they’re a different room! So you usually end up hiding Miranda behind a huge box so you can use her Warp ability without her trying to actually hurt things with that tiny SMG. The only companion I ever brought into the thick of battle was Grunt because he’s nearly invincible, has a shotgun and a shielding power, and can ram enemies with his head.

That brings me to the difficulty. Thankfully, the hardest difficulty mode (Insanity) is now available from the start instead of needing to be unlocked by not one but TWO play-throughs like in the original Mass Effect. I opted to play on Insanity from the very beginning and never regretted it, because lo and behold I was actually being CHALLENGED! By Mass Effect! I had to give my companions orders and think carefully about which weapons and powers to use, even which companions to bring on a mission! Sadly this happens less frequently as you proceed through the game if you buy every upgrade. This is a problem with RPGs where your character levels up and gets better stuff: he inevitably becomes better equipped than the enemy, and thus they have a hard time killing him. Maybe they’ll even remove THAT next time, thus eliminating all of what gaming culture considers to be “RPG elements.” But what makes an RPG is not “leveling up” and/or “gathering items” but MAKING CHOICES, so this would be perfectly okay with me. Still, ME2 is generally harder if you bump up the difficulty, and I consider that a good thing.

All in all, the combat in Mass Effect 2 is entertaining and challenging, and I actually looked forward to fights rather than dreading them like in BioWare’s other recent RPG, Dragon Age (although there was still a little too much combat in both). Sadly, they dragged one gameplay aspect down into the gutter, and that’s the exploration. Being able to move your ship around on the map like it’s a board game piece is just a silly gimmick, the addition of “limited fuel” doesn’t really affect jack squat, and the “scanning” and “probing” of planets for resources is more tedious and less immersive than driving around in the Mako on some random rocky terrain. At least that had scenery and made the world feel more open than the cramped little mission zones in ME2. Thankfully it’s easy to get enough resources to buy upgrades, so don’t make the same mistake I did and scan every planet dry, because you’ll end up with more excess minerals than a thumb-sized multivitamin.

I’m one of the few people who actually enjoyed the Mako in the first game, even if it did get tedious after a while. But if you hated it like most people, you’ll be happy. Much to my dismay, the Mako is now smoldering atop a slagheap in the “Normandy Crash Site” DLC, never to be driven again. Although I’ve heard a new vehicle sequence will be added in upcoming DLC, ME2 does not require you to drop down to a square mile of a planet’s surface and hunt for rocks. Instead, each side-mission you find on an alien world consists of dropping into a little combat zone you have to run through. But wait, there is an up-side! BioWare heard all of your complaints about killing the same bunch of enemies in the same room over and over, and the side-missions in ME2 are now WAY more varied. Each one has its own gimmick; sometimes you don’t even bring your whole team with you, instead just going alone and not even fighting anything. And they feel more important to the actual story overall, with many of them leading up to other quests and eventually connecting with the main plot somehow. Heck, even the “hacking” minigames are more fun now!

One more thing: About Downloadable Content. Mass Effect’s DLC is kind of weird. A bunch of it was released as soon as the game came out, making you think that once again a developer withheld stuff from the game so they could charge you extra for it. But then they went and made most of it free anyway, since most copies of the game include a free “Cerberus Network” membership card. Maybe this was done to soften the blow for when they actually start charging? Or maybe it was done to excuse the fact that the addon companion, Zaeed, is not fully fleshed-out (you can’t have conversations with him on ship; he just tells you war stories). Either way, yeah, you can get DLC any time, mostly for free, and they keep releasing lots of it to keep you playing, even if each installment is small and simple. Unlike Mass Effect 1’s DLC, you don’t have to start a whole new game to play this if you’ve already finished, because ME2 is open-ended! That’s right: you can continue playing after you’ve finished the main story.

Of course, all that this Gameplay section has covered is just combat and exploring and stuff. An important part of ME2’s gameplay is the plot and how you can affect it. I’ll get to that in the final, “story” section of this review.

SOUND

There is little to complain about in Mass Effect 2’s sound effects – they fit the bill, and none of them are quite the “stock sounds you’ve heard a thousand times.” However, the music seems to have taken a back seat in this game. I really liked the techno-future soundtrack of Mass Effect 1; I even bought the soundtrack. But the music of ME2 is just a little less noticeable, a little more toned-down. You usually don’t even notice it until the game hits the most epic spots. When you visit the Captain’s Quarters on the Normandy in ME2 you can play the original ME soundtrack on your radio, and I would frequently do this to remind myself how much better it was. Maybe I will notice the ME2 music more when I play the game a second time, but on my first play-through I was a bit disappointed. The biggest up-side to all this is that no horrid song plays during the end credits this time.

Another important aspect of a game like this is the voice acting. I’m the kind of weirdo who knows the names of actual ‘voice actors’ whose faces you never, ever see, and I was saddened to find that despite their enormous talent, they only play minor characters in this game. Major characters have their voices and even their faces provided by screen actors, who are sometimes not as good in general (sorry, Miranda). It irks me that in the ‘actor interviews’ video released by the publisher, we never get to see the voice of Shepard (male or female) shown even once. Okay, I know you’re thinking by now, “Yes yes, more celebrity pandering in video games knocking voice actors out of a job, waaah waaah, but ARE THEY GOOD, SCORP?!” Yes, they’re pretty good. At no point in the game is your immersion broken by an especially bad spot of dialogue, even though Miranda slips at times. But I still would have liked a krogan or turian voice by Jim Cummings in my squad, rather than having him voice that mustached nobody sitting in my crew quarters, only making the occasional comment as I wander by.

STORY

The story picks up right where ME1 left off, quite literally, since (THANK YOU BIOWARE!) they actually included the long-forgotten ability to import your character from the first game. This is the first time they have used this feature since Baldur’s Gate II. In ME2, any storyline choices you made in ME1 have a chance to affect things. And believe me, you will WANT to have played Mass Effect 1. Not only is it an awesome experience that you should not miss, but if you are starting a new game in ME2 instead of importing, the game assumes the following (I’ll try not to be too spoilery here):

- You chose the Renegade ending.
- You chose to romance the human crewmember of the opposite sex.
- When forced to sacrifice a crew member on a mission, you sacrificed the one of your same sex.
- You were unable to convince Wrex to stand down, and he ended up dead.

Let me just reiterate that last one: YOU KILLED WREX, THE BEST CHARACTER IN MASS EFFECT. You jerk. Play the first game and import, for the sake of poor Wrex. And this time get enough Paragon or Renegade points to convince him to stay alive, as silly as that whole concept may be (more on that later). Also, you get some minor bonuses for importing a high-level character with lots of money. Sadly some of your most important choices have little effect on ME2’s main story, since the Council has basically no involvement at all in the Terminus Systems, which is where the game is set. Hopefully this will change in ME3.

They still give you a chance to edit your character even if you import, so you can reconstruct your face if you didn’t like it, and you can choose a different class if you want to take advantage of some of the new class-specific abilities the game has to offer. I stuck with Infiltrator because they’re awesome and now they can cloak. This is because after a short introductory sequence, Shepard ends up “dead” and has to be resurrected (with science!) by the pro-human organization Cerberus. The main difference between Cerberus and the Council is that Cerberus gives  you a bigger, better ship and generally fusses at you a lot less, making you wonder why they’re supposedly the badguys here (more on that later).

Just like the gameplay, everything about the Mass Effect method of storytelling has been amped up a notch in this second installment. You know how in ME1 Shepard would occasionally do something interesting during a conversation, like grab some guy’s throat or point his gun at them if he was being a bully? And you remember how the camera would occasionally get all cinematic when the NPC was saying something important? Well, in ME2 those kinds of things happen ALL THE TIME! I can’t emphasize this enough. NPCs walk around more, act more alive, the camera switches views frequently to give us better shots, and there is usually at least one chance for Shepard to do something awesome. Sometimes, you will get a chance to perform actions rather than just talking during a conversation sequence. A little icon will appear, and if you decide to push it in time, then Shepard will perform either a “paragon” or “renegade” action, like helping an injured person to their feet and giving them some medigel, or else shoving a guy through a window, to give just a few examples.

::RED ALERT: RANT INCOMING!::

But I just can’t help but complain about the stupid paragon/renegade thing a bit, so hear me out. I always try “role play” in RPGs by making the choices that either I or the character I am playing would make. This means I do occasionally go with renegade options when playing ‘myself,’ since my moral compass doesn’t always point in the direction prescribed by BioWare. I do occasionally kill nasty people that BioWare says I should spare, and I occasionally let people go that BioWare thinks fully deserve a gruesome death.  To name just one example of how this system is seriously flawed, if you scold the assassin character Thane about abandoning his son to go gallivant around the galaxy killing people for a living, YOU GET RENEGADE POINTS. Because it’s mean and it hurts his widdew feewings, even though he’s an ASSASSIN for crying out loud.

But instances like that are not even the worst part; I don’t mind being called “you renegade!” because hey, it ‘s a cool word and red is my favorite color anyway. The part that bothers me is that the game rewards you for sticking to one path and one path only. Sure, it’s still more forgiving about it than SOME games out there, but what it boils down to is that you won’t be able to intimidate people if you aren’t frequently just a mean guy, and you sometimes you can’t say the diplomatic option because you haven’t kissed enough babies this week. ME2 doesn’t even have you put points on “persuade” or “intimidate” like ME1; instead it just depends directly on your paragon/renegade score itself. So you will have a hard time playing a badguy who is a suave negotiator or a goodguy who is a bit… direct.

Oh, and you remember that thing in BioWare’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KotOR) where your character would start turning ugly if he gained Dark Side points for doing evil things? Well, they decided to put that in ME2 and bill it as a side-effect of your “reconstruction” by Cerberus. You can buy a medical tool for a BOATLOAD of minerals that will restore your face to normal permanently, but it still seems pretty silly to me, and it highlights once again that BioWare is saying “this is wrong” to your “renegade” actions, even if you feel they are justified. In general it means they want you to play a Democrat rather than a Republican, and just as in real life, you’ll have a hard time trying to be an Independent (believe me, I know).

Each time you enter a conversation tree, you always know which choices are paragon and which are renegade because paragon ones are on top and renegade on the bottom. It’s so bloody stupid. So you always know that the Illusive Man must be evil because the game gives you “good points” for being a jerk to him, even though he brought you back from the dead, gave you a nice new ship, seldom forces you to do things you don’t like, and just generally jerks you around a lot less than the “good” council in the first game. He doesn’t even seem all that racist; he encourages you to hire a crap-load of aliens for your party, after all. And the final “good vs. evil” decision at the end of the main plot doesn’t even seem like that big of a deal at all, at least to me. But no, we always know not to pick that lower conversation option if we’re being a nice guy.

I mean, sure, the morality choices are WAY better and more nuanced than the black-and-white ones that other developers are sticking in a lot of non-RPG games now, but I still hate that stupid conversation circle. I wish I could hate it to death.

:: ALERT CANCELLED: RANT OVER::

Anyway, back to the actual story.

When I played the first Mass Effect, most of the characters disappointed me. They didn’t have the same level of personality as your companions in some BioWare titles like Baldur’s Gate II or KotOR. Thankfully the writers have totally changed that this time around. Everyone on your whole ship seems more like a living, breathing person now, and their characters and backgrounds are well-explored in each character’s side-quest. Remember how Wrex and Garrus had side-quests in ME1 that amounted to little more than killing yet another room of badguys just for them to make one comment at the end? Well, now each one is a little, self-contained episode of the game, with well-rendered cutscenes and a well-rounded character that you can help to shape. And furthermore, each character is also INTRODUCED in the same kind of well-developed, self-contained story level.

But this emphasis on party members comes at a price: the main plot suffers as a result. Basically they decided to take the character development and make it the main purpose of the game. Part of your primary mission parameters at each stage of the game is to pick up certain party members and then ensure their loyalty to you by doing their side-quests. All of this culminates in a final battle in which some of your party members (or even you, Commander Shepard) may die permanently if you made poor choices and/or did earn their loyalty. I have mixed feelings about all this. It still seems like your characters seldom interact in conversations that are not part of their own specific story, and except for one or two cases, you spend most of your time resolving a single party member’s family issues rather than, saving entire colonies from destruction. And with the story split up into so many little missions (the whole game could have easily been released in episodic format), none of the important planets and their associated stories seem very fleshed out. I wish BioWare would go back to the KotOR format, since KotOR had both well-developed characters AND good main plot missions.

Still, the character missions are fantastic on their own, and somehow Mass Effect 2 ties all of them together into an epic ending battle that makes you overlook all of this in its awesomeness.

That’s right, the final mission – the “suicide mission” in which anyone in your group might permanently DIE – is made of awesome.  I’ve always hated the way recent BioWare games only let you bring 2-3 people from your group at one time, thus making you wonder why you even have the rest of the buffoons sitting around on your ship doing nothing. The end of ME2 brings all of your characters together and gives them a role in the fight, even if they aren’t part of your personal “squad.” It’s awesome, and the only letdown is the very final boss. I won’t give it away, but let’s just say that the storyline’s overall impact suffers from the dreaded “second in a trilogy” syndrome, in which the second installment is basically a sojourn, a little sidetrack between the beginning and the end. If you were expecting to fight the Reaper fleet that was mentioned at the end of the first game, well… you’ll have to wait until number three.

But I’m starting to think I’m giving you the wrong impression. Despite my nitpicking, I LOVED Mass Effect 2. I can’t stress enough how good the writing is. Even though each character quest is basically family issues (Miranda wants you to help with her sister, Jacob and Tali with their fathers, Thane his son, Samara her daughter, Grunt his clan, and Garrus and Zaeed with old partners who turned traitor – only Jack manages to think of something different), but they’re so well-written that it’s not a huge detriment. They can even reverse first impressions. I hated Thane when I first met him because he seemed like every kid’s fan fiction character: a black leather-clad assassin who is emotionally conflicted and actually good even though he murders for a living. But after talking with him a while and learning to like the gimmicks of his species (reptilian nature, perfect memory, awesome-looking extra eyelids) and delving into his personality through his side-mission… I found that… I liked him. Sure, his conversations seemed to sometimes cut off abruptly because my character wasn’t female (and thus not a romance option), but I still ended up liking him due to the quality writing.

Speaking of romance, I actually found it annoying sometimes. Samara, who seems boring at first, turned out to be one of my favorites, partially because her conversations are never inhibited by potential romance like almost everyone else’s. There are tons of romance options in ME2, and you have to choose just one. I’ve always liked Tali and wanted to continue talking to her, but unlike some fans (they call themselves Talimancers, I kid you not) I just couldn’t seem to get romantic with a gas-masked alien whose face I’d never seen. She might have a Predator mouth, you know? But when I wouldn’t commit to her, I couldn’t progress in her conversations past a certain point. Garrus seems to suffer the worst. If you’re not romancing him, he won’t say anything except that he’s ‘busy calibrating’ stuff. Oh well… The sex has been toned down in ME2, so you don’t get to see brief ‘nudity’ this time; instead you just kind of cuddle with your partner. If you don’t choose a romance, then Shepard just looks longingly at a photo of his romantic partner from the previous game, hinting that they may return as party members in ME3. And they’ll probably be pissed if you cheated on them.

Oh, and you can get a hamster for your Captain’s Quarters. It’s called a “space hamster.” And he looks up you with a “knowing smile.” That officially makes ME2 a better spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate II than Dragon Age, because THEY PUT BOO IN IT. HE EVEN MAKES BOO’S EXACT SQUEAK. There are few things that can evoke a true fanboy moment from me, but that was one of them.

CONCLUSION

I find it so hard to review RPGs, because I just can’t shut up about them. I can go on and on about each and every little detail in this kind of game, and as a result my review could seem nitpicky and negative. But that’s just because I’m an RPG-obsessed BioWare fanboy who plays all of their games several times over. And from that position, let me tell you that Mass Effect 2 is an excellent RPG that does just about everything right in its own cinematic sci-fi RPG-shooter way. I’m sure that by the time Mass Effect 3 finishes up the trilogy (because it’s ALWAYS a trilogy), the series will be rightfully hailed as one of the greatest epic sagas in the history of gaming. If you’ve been missing out on this experience, rectify your error immediately. Join the universe of Mass Effect and play both games NOW.

Score: 5/5

Tags: BioWare, Mass Effect, RPGs