Backhand of Justice

Mass Effect 2 is a sprawling experience. An entire world awaits your exploration, and your task of assembling a motley crew to battle the evil Collector race and save humanity is pulpy Saturday afternoon fun.

If you like role playing and conversation, you’ll love this game. If you like cover based squad shooting, you’ll love this game. If you like weird alien fish races and futuristic space prostitutes, you’ll love this game. There is so much to love about this game. Is it perfect? Not by a long shot. It has set a high early bar for game of the year honors, however, and it’s going to take a heroic effort to dethrone Mass Effect 2.

What went right?

Character personality

At its heart, Mass Effect 2 is a game about interactions. Each of Mass Effect 2’s characters has their own unique personality. This doesn’t only extend to the main crew members, but also to the random people you encounter in random space stations. Not once did somebody have a reaction to a situation that I found unrealistic or out of character.

For every mission you get to choose 2 members of your team to accompany you, and it’s interesting to try to take personalities that are diametrically opposed to each other to spice up a situation. Each character has their own responses and comments for every mission, and knowing a race’s history can be useful.

For example, the Quarians and Geth are racial enemies, so it’s fun to bring your Geth companion onto the Quarian home fleet just to change things up.

By the end of the game, Asari and Turian characters will blend right in with the humans as just another part of your crew. They're that realistic

Art style

Mass Effect 2 is a beautiful game. The environments are varied and everything is well designed. The space stations look real; they aren’t overly high tech but are appropriate (who can say, I suppose, but they look reasonable) for how far into the future they are.

Characters are unique and have tons of little details that mostly stem from various animals, and yet even the least human ones have great personality and expressive faces.

The weapons and enemies are all top notch, and the explosions and biotic power special effects are great and never get old even though you use them thousands of times throughout the game.

On more than one occasion I stopped and looked around and said ‘this is somewhere to which I’d like to travel.’ Am I really the only one who would like to go to the seedy space nightclub ‘Afterlife?’ I doubt it.

The bloodthirsty Krogan are one of the funniest races you'll encounter in Mass Effect 2, but like all Bioware characters none of the Krogan you meet will be 1-dimensional

Little touches

So many games take little shortcuts to streamline their visuals. Mass Effect 2 is not one of those games.

One of the best little touches I noticed was that frequently people will compliment your guns, or notice that you’re carrying them and treat you with caution. In most games, it is just assumed that you have guns on you. In Mass Effect 2, however, every gun you are carrying is displayed on your back in a surprisingly non-awkward or cumbersome way.

While this can become hilarious when you carry the largest weapons and turn into a walking tank, each time you select a new weapon you actually holster your current weapon and smoothly unholster whatever new weapon you selected. It’s these little details that make the world convincing.

In addition, your body language speaks volumes, and animations aren’t merely functional. Conversational interruptions are smoothly integrated into your dialogue options and well executed.

High tech doorways, computer interfaces and outfits are as realistic as fantasy products can be, and it’s these little details that combine to create a world that seems alive.

The husks are some of the most single minded and annoying characters you'll encounter. Mostly they want to punch and bite you

Choices

Mass Effect 2 is a Bioware game, and their top gameplay feature is choice. They started the trend with KotoR, and perfected it with Dragon Age: Origins. While ME2 doesn’t have quite the same level of choice allowed in Dragon Age, there is still more here than in most other games.

The main choice mechanic in Mass Effect 2 is the paragon/renegade meter, where you get paragon or renegade points depending on what conversation and action choices you make during encounters.

Which option is the friendliest or most rude isn’t always obvious, either. The dialogue system is the same used in Mass Effect where you choose the general gist of what you want to say rather than the exact words. If you’re a jerk, even if you’re doing somebody a favor, you might get a couple renegade points.

If you stop somebody from shooting their childhood friend in a moment of frustration and anger, however, you might receive a huge number of paragon points. These open up additional good or bad conversation options and action moments down the road.

By the end of the game you really feel like you’ve shaped your own path and your Shepard is the one in charge, not some generic game Shepard chosen by Bioware.

Shooting mechanics

Not many would expect a role playing game to have great shooting mechanics. Gamers forgave System Shock 2, Deus Ex and Bioshock for their terrible shooting because the rest of the game was so great. Mass Effect 2 has nothing for which to apologize.

This is a full fledged shooter, with locational damage, tactics and twitch reflexes. Enemies take far more damage from headshots, and choosing the right weapon for the job is critical.

In addition, the game adds biotic powers. As you level up and gain experience you can choose from several powers as well as adopt some of the special abilities of your team. Battlefield management is key because not only are some abilities far more useful against certain opponents and defenses, but the environment can also be used to your advantage by throwing enemies off cliff edges etc.

There are many destructable cover points as well as explosive materials littering the environment, and as ammo is sometimes are a premium (especially earlier in the game). Using every advantage is key.

In the face!

Tactical combat

The squad based combat in Mass Effect 2 is fantastic. You have limited control over your two teammates, but what influence you do have is well implemented. You can utilize their special abilities when they’re not on cooldown, and direct their movement and attacks. If you don’t tell them to do anything, they’ll intelligently react to the current battle situation.

This allows you to set them up in a forward position to lay down covering fire while you advance from cover point to point.  You can also set them to distract an enemy by moving them in front and then flank your opponent and get a free shot from behind. It never gets old.

Exploration

There are a huge number of side missions in Mass Effect 2, and as you go from galaxy to galaxy and explore the dozens of planets on offer while searching for resources, you will occasionally encounter a random mission.

These can range from chasing down mercenaries, to saving a crashing ship, to merely recovering stolen cargo from a pirate facility. They’re great little diversions from the main mission, and the universe in Mass Effect 2 feels massive as a result.

It is easy to imagine there are thousands of worlds out there that you haven’t visited, and the scale of the opposition you face is really put into perspective.

Streamlined RPG elements

Finally, Mass Effect 2 has greatly streamlined the RPG elements from Mass Effect. Inventory management is completely gone. In its place is a very simplistic inventory system where you merely switch out various armor components on your ship, and the tweaks they offer to stats are minor.

In addition, the leveling system breaks down to adding points to one of a handful of abilities to use on the battlefield. It is extremely simple.

To be honest, I only really noticed that I was getting more guns and more abilities; I’m not sure whether the enemies level with you over the course of the game but they never seemed to get easier or harder to take out as I leveled up.

Progression comes from your research system, which gives you access to greater damage and experimental weapons. It also gives your ship upgrades which help to protect your crew during some of the late stages of the game.

Overall, it is a great tradeoff as the game is really about conversation and cover based shooting; managing too many role playing elements would have been cumbersome and frustrating.

Even the alien races are extremely lifelike and expressive. The Asari (pictured) are some of the most human-like, but even the frog-like Drell never once seemed unrealistic. I would think 'they have interesting double eyelid physiology,' and not 'wow that's fake.'

What were they thinking?

Resources collection

The upgrades that you can research in this game require mineral resources to complete. Those resources are found by launching probes onto planets at mineral hotspots and extracting the material. Unfortunately, this process involves moving a criminally slow reticle over the surface of the planet and watching your measuring seismometer to find mineral spikes.

While at first I was diligent about scanning every planet in a system completely before I moved on, I soon learned that there are far more resources out there than are required for every single upgrade in the game, and I’d be better served only mining when it was required.

That being said, this was the most tiresome part of the game by far and whoever decided that this was a good mechanic needs to be fired tout de suite. This problem is slightly alleviated by any subsequent playthroughs after the first offering significant resource bonuses.

There are hacking minigames as well, both of which were a little repetitive but much preferable to the scanning system. The game would have been far more fun if you just received the upgrade when you found the schematics for it instead of having to supply the minerals as well.

Formulaic design

Mass Effect 2 feels like a game. All the rooms in which there is combat are conveniently set up with multiple cover points, and each mission concludes with a summary screen of your accomplishments. While I’m not as big on ‘immersion’ as many gamers, I still think it’s strange that Bioware created such a compelling world and then introduced elements that take you out of it.

In addition, the solution to problems are almost always fairly intuitive if you’ve played a role playing game in the past. The missions are never straightforward, there’s always a twist, but that becomes the norm after a while and therefore expected.

Each one of your crew members has a loyalty mission which delves into their backstory. By the fourth or fifth one, it’s pretty clear that the outcome of the mission will be directly opposed to their preconceived notions going in. It becomes a little predictable.

There is always a right answer

In Mass Effect 2, you have to make a number of choices, but if you’ve been good enough at being consistent with your Paragon or Renegade points, there is always an optimal outcome. There were no choices in the game where I was forced to choose between crew members.

There were no choices in the game like in Mass Effect 1 where you had to choose which crew member was going to sacrifice themselves for the good of the mission. There was always a way out.

While this would be forgivable if this game was released last year, as it would still have allowed the most choice in any game to date, Mass Effect 2 has the misfortune of coming out after Dragon Age.

In Dragon Age there were truly some horrible decisions to be made that tested your resolve. Mass Effect 2 in comparison comes off as having kid gloves and coddling the player, and as a result not being as realistic. It maintains the theme throughout that sacrifices must be made for the good of humanity, but never quite delivers on that promise.

Mass Effect 2 is not a perfect game, and as you can see above there are a couple of shortcomings. That being said, it’s damn close and one of the most fun game experiences I’ve had in a while.

I can’t wait to jump back in and see what happens if I choose all the renegade conversation options. I want to choose different romances, and even take a different crew member (where I can). What if I play through as a female Shepard; how will everybody react to me? Will there be a significant difference? I’m not sure, but I sure as hell want to find out.

I want to explore all the biotic powers. I want to take different crew members on different missions, and even find out what happens if I cut corners on crew upgrades going into the final mission. There are so many possibilities, and only in a game like Mass Effect 2 can they be brought to life.

Unfortunately, I’ll also have to mine more minerals if I play through again. Sigh …