by ChiefJimbolaya

© 2010 Aaron Klein

Like its predecessor, Mass Effect 2 is a game that is so good the only real fault to find in it are squandered opportunities to make it even better.

Technically, it is superior to its predecessor on nearly every level. However, in streamlining the game to enhance the role of combat, BioWare missed out on some of the majesty of aimlessly roaming the galaxy looking for adventure.

If you finished the original game, you can import your character into Mass Effect 2. In addition to your character’s likeness, certain key decisions made in the first game are persistent in Mass Effect 2.

At the end of the first game we discover that giant robots called Reapers have been hibernating at the edge of our galaxy for 50,000 yrs, waiting for a chance to swoop in and destroy all organic life. Although the main character, Commander Shepard, defeated a single Reaper at the end of the first game, the threat is not gone.

In Mass Effect 2 Commander Shepard is working to discover the cause of the disappearance of several human colonies. On his journey Shepard must recruit up to 11 allies, and ensure they are loyal before embarking on the final, supposedly suicide mission.

Each ally has a recruitment mission and as a personal mission to earn their loyalty. The result is a bunch of smaller missions, opposed to a few grand missions in the previous game.

Since most of these missions are centered around the characters in your crew, the sense of urgency of Shepard’s main mission to save humanity is diminished and the entire game feels slightly disjointed for it.

But that’s not exactly a criticism, because the positive trade off is that Mass Effect 2 spends much more time developing believable characters with needs and desires, something video games generally have a difficult time doing.

The addition of Yeoman Chambers, from the Normandy SR-2, a character who acts kind of like ship counselor and Shepard’s secretary, makes it much easier to manage relationships between your crew as she notifies you when one of them is ready to talk about their back stories, which unlocks their loyalty missions.

The final mission becomes available as early as the game’s half-way point. But your success on the mission, including the casualties suffered by your team, is determined by how many of them are loyal.

BioWare has an excellent formula for role-playing games, one that it has consistently expanded and improved upon from Jade Empire to Knights of the Old Republic to Dragons Age and Mass Effect.

Mass Effect 2 represents the most dramatic evolution of this formula to date, greatly simplifying role-playing aspects to emphasize action. It uses the narrative structure of past BioWare games, while abandoning some traditional role-playing elements in favor of cover-based shooting.

The BioWare formula includes moral decision making that impacts narrative, episodic missions to further plot, recruitment and interaction with squad mates and some sort of romantic subplot. All of that remains true in Mass Effect 2.

Combat in Mass Effect 2, however, is vastly improved over the previous game. Its cover-based shooting is similar to Gears of War. Special powers and abilities can be mapped to the controller for smooth use in battle. Squad members are easily directed to cover using the directional pad. Using any character class, combat is fluid, enjoyable and challenging.

Instead of micromanaging your squad’s armaments, Mass Effect 2 ditches the inventory system in favor of a nearly invisible upgrade tree. As you progress you will find alien technology you can scan and use to upgrade the weapons or abilities of your entire squad. After discovering a new technology, the upgrade must be purchased using minerals you find by scanning planets.

Scanning is done through a mini game where you pass a sensor across a planet, launching a probe when resources are detected. (Special note: try exploring Uranus… seriously). This gets tedious very quickly, but it is required if you want to upgrade your team. It almost comes across as an artificial game-lengthener.

This is done in lieu of planetary exploration with the clunky all-terrain Mako vehicle as in the original game.

While technically superior on nearly every level, somehow Mass Effect 2 misses on that intangible sense of wonder that made its predecessor such a groundbreaking title.

The original Mass Effect was an intricate space opera on the scale of Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings. The epicness of its story and its invitation to the player to make crucial plot decisions carried the game past its flaws and into the category of excellence. It is against this background that the absurdities of Mass Effect 2’s plot stand out.

First I want to talk about the setup, and since all the following occurs in the first 30 minutes of gameplay, you shouldn’t be too worried about spoilers.

Shepard’s ship, the SSV Normandy, is attacked and destroyed within the first five minutes of the game. Shepard cant make it to an escape pod in time, plummeting from high orbit and burning up in the atmosphere of a strange planet like a shooting star.

So within the first fifteen minutes, the main character dies and all the team building and work from the first game is erased.

But lo and behold, a rogue black-ops group and former enemy called Cerberus recovers Shepard’s ashen remains and spends two years putting him back together. So at the end of the aptly-named Project Lazarus, Shepard awakens from death as if it were only a deep slumber, picks up a gun and starts blasting aliens as if nothing happened.

And nobody seems to think this is a big deal! The first man since Jesus Christ to get up and walk around after death, and nobody bats an eyelash!

This is just sloppy writing. Especially when BioWare makes a big deal out of the fact that Shepard could die at the end of Mass Effect 2 as a result of the player’s decisions in the game.

Using death as a cheap narrative device in the beginning of the game diminishes the drama and loss at the end of the game. If the writers are not going to take death as a serious consequence, why should the player?

If coming back from crispy skeleton form isn’t improbable enough, Shepard also now works for one of his former enemies, who also happened to rebuild an even better prototype of the Normandy.

One of the most significant innovations in Mass Effect 2 is actually its post-release content delivery system, known as the Cerberus Network.

New copies of the game include a one-time code to activate the Cerberus Network, which will be needed to download bonus content in the coming months.

If you purchase a used copy of the game you could still access the Cerberus Network by purchasing a new code for $15. Since this additional cost would negate the financial benefit of buying used, Electronic Arts is hoping to encourage more people to purchase new copies.

By supporting the game with plans for varying degrees of downloadable content over the next year EA also hopes people will hold onto the game instead of feeding the second-hand market.

If this strategy works, expect to see more major games follow suit.

Note: Aaron Klein is a U.S.-based freelance video game writer. Read more of his reviews at cornfedgamer.com.

Our first ‘critical’ look at Mass Effect 2 here.

© 2010 Aaron Klein

“9/10

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