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Review

Mass Effect 2

10.0

Format Xbox 360

Developer BioWare

Publisher EA Games

Genre Role Playing

26-Jan-2010 It takes more than gigantic space lasers to kill Commander Shepard

35 Comments

Ask someone, anyone, to summarise the events of the first Mass Effect game and they'd have to retire to a well-lit room for a couple of hours, to put together a long document outlining a number of options of where the hell to start.

BioWare's sci-fi universe was exquisitely rich and detailed in story, and pleasingly deep in the relationships that you built with your crew. And thanks to the quality of the script and voice acting, even the minor characters rarely slipped into easy clich�.

Set in a huge universe, in which it genuinely feels possible to finish the game with a huge percentage untouched, Mass Effect 2 is a very similar game to its predecessor. The six classes spread among the three specialities still have the same names, but have been adapted: Engineers move away from their healing role (health regenerates, now), and can command combat drones to distract enemies. Biotics have had their slightly overpowered Lift skill replaced with slightly more balanced crowd control powers, and Soldiers - well, they still shoot enemies with guns.

Everything's been shuffled around slightly to prevent it being too familiar, and the result is more fluid and intuitive combat - ineffective powers are tinted red, preventing you from wasting time. It's also more visually fluid, in terms of the game's improved frame rate.

Working alongside the regular levelling up and team-building rewards for missions, is the familiar progress along Mass Effect's trademark conversation trees. Be a pious hero, and you'll develop along the Paragon branch, unlocking new ways to be ever more lovely. Or, as the game puts it, "become the ultimate badass" by following the Renegade path, which usually involves hurling accusations, saying you quite like genocide, and meting out justice of the brisk and deadly variety. This system also lets you intervene in some cutscenes, to change the outcome of a conversation. For a fairly bipolar morality system, it still manages to be stylish, and both sides are written well enough to fit into Shepard's believable range of actions.

Life skills
Let's talk about what fans of the first game care about: the plot. After an ambush, the opening scenes of the sequel see Shepard walking along the outside of his freshly-destroyed starship, the Normandy. His attempt to save Joker fails, as a huge laser shears him from the vessel and he swirls into the atmosphere of a nearby planet. If you're going to have your hero reset to level one - which he is - you might as well get slaughtered in style.

So, Shepard is recovered, restructured, and resurrected by Cerberus, a secretive pro-human organisation who might - or might not - be a well-spoken, more ambitious, and better-funded version of the BNP. Under the instruction of the charming and morally ambiguous Illusive Man, Shepard is provided with a similar Normandy, and resumes the business of assembling a crew to save humanity. Each crew member has his own personal journey that's handled with a wonderful lack of sentimentality.

The temptation to blurt and gush here is intense: but it's not our place to rob you of your own journey. Safe to say: the Reapers are still at large, the effects of the genophage are keenly felt, and thousands of human colonists are getting paralysed by swarms of insects, and abducted by a mysterious new threat, the Catchers.

The streamlined combat gives you flexibility to play as you see fit. It's difficult, but possible, to play the game as a traditional FPS lone wolf - fallen teammates are automatically revived when the battle lulls, allowing you to save medi-gel. But the game can slip quickly into repetition. It's much more rewarding - and feels more correct - to take the hands-on approach.

Using the pause menu, you can direct your squad to cover, change their weapons, and personally conduct their attack skills. There's enough time to become intimate with all ten squad members' skills, and although there's some overlap, you'll soon find your favourites.

Only rarely do the mood-breaking moments come in, and it's the usual problems: why, when you've written a game with so much beautiful, varied, and expressive dialogue, would you cycle a palette of two or three exclamations during combat? It reaches a bewildering peak in an otherwise excellent battle on board the Catchers' ship. During the climactic fight, the Overseer takes control of his minions, and proceeds to bore your squad to noisy tears by repeating the same three things he said the first time you met him, seven hours ago. But that, the needlessly slow mining process, and the two hacking mini-games that repeat too often and don't get harder, are our only real complaints, and for a game this long to attract such little ire is phenomenal.

Exploration rewards you with a wealth of optional content. Take your early encounter with Archangel - on the way to meet him, you can use your Renegade trigger reactions to kill a man repairing a gunship that you'll later have to fight. You can also hack a robot's Friend or Foe circuitry, preventing it from attacking you later on. It's the difference between a slog and a breeze, and it's a shame (although understandable) that these short-cuts peter out towards the later levels.

Voyage of discovery
As for the sheer volume of missions, you're given an impressive amount of freedom to complete them as you see fit. The more you explore and talk, the more opens up, and you can even explore galaxies on spec, mining planets for minerals and keeping an eye out for the anomalies that tell you there's a secret mission on that planet.

ME2 rewards exploration by ballooning into an epic monster. You don't just have to recruit your crew members - you can have extended heart-to-hearts with them, and help them in personal missions that not only boost your heroism, but unlock their tantalisingly greyed-out fourth power.

If you love sci-fi, or want to see what powerful storytelling video games are capable of, ME2 is essential. Sometimes it feels like the main plot takes a back seat to the stories of your crew, and as the second part in a trilogy, there's never going to be the sense of resolution we all crave. Perhaps the most important thing to note is the sheer amount of game that's given over to conversation - brilliant dialogue it may be, but if you want to butcher aliens, the action might be too spread out for you.

No developer pulls off moral quandaries with such devastating ambiguity as BioWare, leaving you frequently unsure as to whether you're doing the right thing. It's mature: not because of profanity or nudey bits, but because it tackles complicated themes without telling you what to think. Having already sunk a distressing number of hours into ME2, the second this sentence is finished we're firing it up and exploring the rest of the universe.

For an alternative opinion, check out CVG's Mass Effect 2 review

OXM Staff