Mass Effect 2

So I finished my first run through of Mass Effect 2 last night, it is a very good game Bioware have really refined their story telling technique and as always it's the characters and their often fairly nuanced stories that make it work. It's not without it's failings but it certainly is a great improvement on the orginal in almost every way.

Where they could have put some more work in was the mini games for hacking/bypassing/mining initially these seemed OK but they get quite tedious later on (especially the mining one) The hacking/bypassing games are pretty easy such that you never fail and it becomes just a speed bump rather than any sort of challenge. Some of the characters are bit empty (mainly the initial ones Jacob and Miranda. Who are industrial strength dull most of the time, but some of that is due to how much the other characters stand out.

Combat has had a massive upgrade from the original and is a lot more fun more weapons location specific damage parter AI that most of the time works and doesn't have the issues the first game had where they would often stand in your way right in front of you like lemons while enemies shoot them in the back. This time they take cover and they don't try and bump you from cover. You can command them fairly easily to move should you want and with a tap of the command button you can control what weapon and powers they use. For the most part I left them to their own devices and they only rarely got taken out and needed reviving.

The biotic powers have had some tweaks with practice you can bend them round objects to hit people behind cover even pulling them out into the open with some powers or throwing them off ledges.

There is now almost none of the annoying micromanagement of the first game there are none of the hundreds of weapon types and add ons and armours and armour plugins. Basically only your character has selectable armour and it is almost a cosmetic choice (though each armour and armour piece has some bonuses but nothing that is game changing) with weapons you basically have two or three types of anything across the game but again it's mostly cosmetic it auto equips the latest and greatest. The heavy weapons are quite variable from the grenade launcher to the ice rocket that freezes things to the flame thrower and then the one shot nuclear death cannon (redeemer esq for it's ability to often kill the user as well as it's target) these are mostly gained by research a new feature you gain access to early on.

Research allows you to upgrade weapons armour and ship stats (more or less globally) add bonuses to biotics new heavy weapons and so forth. You collect blueprints from shops or out in the world then use mined materials to research them once you have enough of the materials and you meet the prerequisites you can just research the upgrade. The mining mini game can be a little tedious you sweep a scanner across a planet and a little graph shows when you are over sufficient density for a harvest and you launch a probe (of which you have finite numbers and have to purchased at fuel depots) various planets have various concentrations of resources from rich to poor eventually a mined planet will go to depleted when you've sucked the marrow from the bones.

Occasionally scanning reveals an anomaly which is one way to get side quests. These are little varied missions. The mako of the first game is gone and the new framework wouldn't really support it anyway you never land on a planet unless you are in a mission area. There is none of the long wilderness exploring of the first game.

The cast is varied from characters from the first game reappearing and occasionally popping up and either joining or not. You start off with two followers Miranda and Jacob and the game is basically going around recruiting a team of loveable psychopaths as you then get to know them there is the option to do a loyalty quest which if successful gains them an additional power and costume. These loyalty quests are often very well put together with some nice varied gameplay and adding a lot to the back story and depth of the characters involved.

The romance system is back, I didn't manage to participate in it due to a slight miscalculation that led the character I had romanced getting turned into a fine paste. If you import a mass effect 1 save the romance carrys over though you can be unfaithful to them with possible effect in mass effect 3.

The paragon and renegade options are back with the addition of the new interrupt which occasionally pops up where a renegade or paragon icon with appear on screen during the action and you can choose to hit a button to do an appropriate action (renegade mostly involves shooting things or in one case shoving someone off a building paragon involves hugging and stopping people shooting) you can also just ignore the icon and let events run their course. This addition is fairly subtle and it is applied in a thoughtful manner and it felt pretty natural where it did crop up. It does mean you can't just sit back and watch the dialogue roll along since it can crop up at any point and you don't always have a long time to decide.

The voice acting is top notch with a lot of big names and voice acting regulars Jennifer Hale reprising her role as the female Shepard, Martin Sheen as the illusive man with a load of others like Claudia Black, Adam Bladwin, Carrie-Anne Moss. Michael Dorn, Yvonne Strahovski, and Seth Green returns as Joker (who at one point has a scene where the dialogue is "FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! ..." and so on for about two minutes which at the time is fairly appropriate :D ).

The graphics are great all the usual modern refinements bloom depth of field effects high dynamic range etc. They've got rid of the annoying texture load in problems that marred all the early unreal engine 3 games. The set pieces are very pretty and there is a section early on where you are walking through a ship that is torn open to reveal a planet above it which really was spectacular. The character design is good and varied and they've put some more polish into the shaders to make the skin tones a bit better from the previous game.

One thing Bioware have really mastered is how to design their scenes to be interesting and cinematic from the early days where they would just show a shot of the character when they were speaking and switch back and forth now there is more movement more framing the use of focus and other effects to make it more involving it's all part of what draws you in to the world and it's characters.

This is the middle part of the trilogy which can be a difficult story to tell but bioware work neatly round that, the main story of humans being kidnapped is good but the main focus is on the crew of characters you are gathering to fight this threat it give you something to engage with and allows them to lay out the middle part of their epic without it feeling empty. The fact that they are designing each part of the story to flow into each other and effect the overall story is interesting and pretty challenging technically it will be interesting to see how it works out.

All in all this is a great game stripped down of most of the failings of the first game improved in areas it was lacking in the first keeping the wonderful story telling and characters adding to the universe in a meaningful way and progressing the story of humanity and their place in the grand scheme of things. It has a few niggles but nothing big enough to really impact the greatness of the rest of the game. Highly recommended.