Mass Effect 2 (2010)

Well I did promise my review of the worthy sequel to Mass Effect before long so here it is. What can I say about a game that is by many gamer’s standards one of the best computer games ever made. I suppose I could just agree and say well yep it pretty much is, this game is fucking awesome and like Mass Effect is one of the best computer games ever made. The same game engine was used though with significant updates which improve the quality of the graphics, improving the quality of the graphics over a game where they were already pretty much shit hot I might add. Once again Bioware hit the nail on the head with this one and it does in some ways feel like ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ of the Mass Effect saga. If the third instalment is to be ‘Return of the Jedi’ then hopefully it will round off this series of games with a suitably epic finale. I’m reserving judgment on that game and praying to the God I don’t believe in that they don’t fuck it up which seems from some of the chatter on the Internet to be a distinct possibility. But in comparing this instalment to ‘Empire’ I think I’m doing it justice because this game is much darker than the first. The main character dies at the beginning of the game only to be resurrected by the Nazis of the future and their xenophobic leader – the illusive man. Throughout the game, characters from the first instalment question your loyalties and motives whilst you serve the purposes of the sinister Cerberus organisation. But it seems no other organisation in the game will head Shepherd’s warnings leaving you with no other choice than to work for the bad guys. To this end you must assemble the meanest squad of assassins, convicts, lunatics, thieves and lowlifes the galaxy can muster and then attempt a suicide mission beyond a mass relay no one has before returned from.

So the only game I can really compare this one to is the first. Like the first, the graphics and score are amazing and add a deep overall atmosphere to the game. Combine this with the excellent scripting and voice acting which has 546 characters speaking 31,000 lines of dialogue or around 10,000 more than Mass Effect. You would expect a deeper and more complex plot than the first to unfold because of this, but paradoxically this doesn’t seem to be the case. This is probably my biggest gripe with the game – it doesn’t expand on the Mass Effect universe nearly as much as the first and this was a little disappointing. True we get to see things that were hinted at in the first game such as the war-torn Krogan homeworld and the Quarian Flotilla and these are things we really wanted to see but we are denied the deeply complex political intrigue of the first. I suspect that the third game is where this series will really shine because we’ll get to see all of the home worlds of the major races and this will in many ways complete the picture of the ME universe. This game did streamline the RPG mechanics considerably, in fact mostly to the point of just getting rid of them altogether. This does make the game easier to play but I think the cutbacks were a little excessive and some are likely to be reintroduced in the third. The main focus of the plot of this game is on the characters of the team you build and helping them all fix qualms in their lives before undertaking the suicide mission. Failure to complete their loyalty missions results in their deaths on the suicide mission, and failure to complete any of the the loyalty missions results in your own upon completing the game. This will probably make it a little weird in how your decisions are supposed to carry over to the third. Oh yes, forgot to mention that, all the decisions you make in the first game have an effect on the characters in this one. Some of the main decisions from the first have a serious effect on how aliens view humanity – such as whether you decided to save the council or not. Either way though the ruling council still wants nothing to do with you since you’re a member of Cerberus so it becomes obvious that the outcome of many decisions wont become obvious until the final chapter. And this is my ultimate gripe with this instalment, much of it felt unnecessary, you thwart a reaper plot but so what, they’ll be here en-masse in the third game, felt too much like a filler episode.

Ultimately though, these complaints are largely trivial. You still have a massive universe to explore and although the missions are linear, the order to approach them isn’t giving the game a hybrid sandbox feel. The vistas are impressive and for the most part superior to the excellent first. The same moral shades of grey in your decision making exists and the game is just as absorbing as its predecessor. Stars Martin Sheen, Carrie Anne-Moss, Tricia Helfer, Claudia Black and Adam Baldwin amongst others. An excellent and worthy sequel which I liked probably a little more than the first.