Geekscape Games – Mass Effect 2 Review

Let’s not beat around the bush here. We all know Mass Effect 2 is the highly anticipated continuation of Commander Shepard & Co.’s story as they fight to save humanity, and the rest of the galaxy, from the Reapers. Bioware’s initial 2007 effort certainly left me with three years of the utmost stern reflection upon the little decisions that “David Maydoney” Shepard made through out the course of the game. Were the right decisions made? More importantly, do they pay off? Mostly. Let’s not beat around the bush here. We all know Mass Effect 2 is the highly anticipated continuation of Commander Shepard & Co.’s story as they fight to save humanity, and the rest of the galaxy, from the Reapers. Bioware’s initial 2007 effort certainly left me with three years of the utmost stern reflection upon the little decisions that “David Maydoney” Shepard made through out the course of the game. Were the right decisions made? More importantly, do they pay off? Mostly.

To show my dedication to the preservation of human kind as we know it, I offer you these stats as a reflection of my efforts:
Game Play (commenced immediately upon coming home with ME2): 40 hrs
Liquids Consumed: 4 1/2 liters of Dr. Pepper, 1/2 liter of iced tea (homemade)
Food Consumed: 8 hot dogs (no buns), 5 Cadbury Caramel Eggs, 3 Cadbury Cream Eggs, 3 Double Stuffed Oreos, and a handful of those new dreadful sweethearts valentines day candies
Showers taken, post purchase: 0 showers
Sleep breaks (all taken in my living room): 10 hrs
Time spent between black living room love seat and tan pleather couch: 11 hrs/39 hrs, respectively
pairs of batteries replaced in worst controller ever designed: 5 pairs
times spent tearing up the house like a fiend and invading the privacy of others in the house so that I could find batteries to feed my addiction: 2 times

Now that you know my faith is pure and my gaming is strong, let’s continue:

It seems like, in the effort to fix everything wrong with ME1, Bioware has turned around and ruined everything right with the original. The combat in ME2 is, without a doubt, a huge improvement. Everyone seems to be whining about how the thermal clip “ammo” situation doesn’t make sense when compared to the limitless ammo weapons from the first game. While I completely agree with that, the fact that I don’t have to suffer through numerous deaths because my gun keeps overheating makes the leap in believing technology would regress absolutely worth while. Of course, the problem I had with the new system was that there never seemed to be enough clips floating around. The cover system is magic, despite how fucking slow Shepard is to get down from an open space. Even better then the cover system is the fact that my teammates actually feel like real people who show the value of their own lives by not blindly running into enemy fire and they shoot enemies with a sense of purpose. Being able to map my own abilities to buttons on the controller was also a god-send and did a lot to keep me in the action.

I think the main problem with this game has to do with the fact that it’s the shooter side of the perfectly-melded-shooter/rpg coin, and it is way too easy as a consequence. Since the rpg elements are so stripped down, it doesn’t seem like any advancement in weapons or abilities makes a huge difference. I am reasonably sure that I could have beaten this game with no upgrades or new weapons what so ever. For weapons, I only found 1 submachine gun that had a hugely noticeable difference right off the bat. The fact that you don’t get to load up specific weapons with specific perks makes the ability to choose between multiple weapons of the same type absolutely pointless. If I can just augment any weapon with incendiary or cryo rounds on a whim, why would I ever pick the weaker of two guns? Bioware doesn’t need to save face for stripping away rpg elements by pretending to give me a choice. The leveling of abilities is similarly hindered in that advancement is only really noticeable when an ability is maxed out. Even then, it seems to hardly make a difference. So, you basically start out with the best shit in the game. The only variable is your ability to play. So, anyone who is halfway decent at shooters, like myself, can steamroll through anything when you’ve got the best guns pointed at pretty weak enemies.

_{“Think it takes more than 40 thermal clips to take down a mech? You’d be surprised.”}

These problems are bad enough to hurt some of the things that ME2 does right. The scan/probe mini-game kinda sucked, but was a vast improvement from aimlessly driving around in the maco. The thing is, I could have handled the slow scanning process if my upgrades felt like they actually did something. I always had more than enough credits to buy endless probes, which totally undermines the scanning process. I could just send a probe out on a whim instead of really hunting for high concentrations of elements and it wouldn’t have mattered, because of all the fucking money I had. There is zero excuse for making me by fuel. How come it costs fuel to travel between systems in a cluster, but not planets within a system? You could probably write it off by saying some bullshit like “interplanetary travel only uses a minute amount of fuel while travel within a cluster uses considerable fuel,” but come on. There’s no consequence to flying around like an asshole and losing fuel because you’ll just FTL jump to the nearest fuel depot. Why am I not FTL jumping everywhere then, you asses? That’s pretty much what happened in the first game, right? Plus, the fuel is just a nuisance because of the previously mentioned fat stack of credits that “David Maydoney” Shepard has in his cabin.

_{“Hail the Normandy, Cerberus gave me a brand new whip. Take it past Omega 4, gonna board me a Collector’s ship”}

As for the characters and story, ME2 does a great job of making every character charming in one way or another. Everyone’s got a really interesting backstory and I found myself trying to get through missions quickly so I could get back on the Normandy to talk to people. Even supplementary characters are entirely interesting and do a great job of showing the other side of what ever dilemma you’re dealing with. So, any decision, especially those that could be potentially fatal to the beloved crew, was wonderfully difficult.

Unfortunately, the fact that the game is too easy and too stripped away of its rpg origins goes so far as to adversely effect the characters and the story. Starting with the characters, Shepard builds a wonderfully large and diverse team for his suicide mission. Each member represents a different combo of skills and weapons so that they’re totally unlike anyone else in the team. This should mean that planning a mission involves taking a close look at who is best suited to help me out, but because the game is so easy, you can pick anyone in the game and come out of a mission without having any difficulties. One of my biggest complaints of ME1 was that out of a team of 6 people, I stuck with 3 characters for all my missions. ME2 gives you a squad of 11 to choose from. Unless the game made me take a specific person, I always took the two people I wanted to have sex with the most (Miranda and Jack, because chicks that are bitchy and/or crazy do it for me). At least in ME1, I was making use of half the squad, rather than ME2’s 18%. Story issues will be more in depth at the end of this article for those of you looking to avoid spoilers. Suffice it to say that the entire mission is burdened with the weight of a suicide mission that doesn’t really exist because of the game’s incredible easy to kill villains.

Fortunately, any flaw in the game is pretty much erased by the fact that your decisions do come with tangible consequences. My house’s xbox lives in the living room, which makes playing Mass Effect an event for the entire house. So, as I was playing ME2, there was an enormous amount of the three of us in my house standing up off the couch and holding each other while saying, “Oh my god!? Is that really *person from the first game*?! It is!!!” Seeing all the little decisions I made coming back to effect the story was so amazing and totally worth enduring an otherwise simply alright game. I’m not normally one to play a game through again after beating it, but I absolutely cannot wait to play this game with totally different decisions. As for the future, I cannot wait to see how all the decisions I’ve made up till now affect the fate of humanity as we know it in Mass Effect 3. I pray the enkindlers will grant bioware the speed and diligence to deliver the finale in less than 3 years. More than that, I hope that bioware can do the seemingly impossible and get the perfectly balanced shooter/rpg coin to land on its side. We’ve seen both sides with the first two games and we’re fully ready to take this coin, toss it into the machine, and save humanity once and for all.

—beware! spoilers ahead!—

As previously mentioned, the story suffers because of the game’s ease. Shepard is on a suicide mission and at no time did I feel that kind of weight. Having fought the collectors several times before the final battle, you know that’s just going to be more of the same. Plus, the final battle is so unremarkable from the rest of the game. I spent like 35 hours gathering my team to dive head first towards death, and I take them to a routine shoot out that ends with a boss fight comparable to the thresher maw that I took down with Grunt. What the fuck, dudes? My game time rounded out at 40 hours, but that entire last bit could not have taken me more than 20 minutes. All of the side missions were entirely more complicated and interesting than this ending. The 11 member crew seems like such a weird way to have gone with this story. Why not give me a smaller but more elite crew, give me half the game to connect with them, and then send us on a hellish mission where pretty much everyone but Shepard and his baby (Miranda or Jack, for me) die. That would have been a hell of a lot more compelling than the story we got. Seriously though, they spent so much time jocking that this was a suicide mission, and there’s a fucking achievement for getting everyone out alive. I remember hearing that Shepard could die for real in the ads for the game. That gave everything a sense of drama, until I foolishly explored my captain’s quarters and saw this achievement. Great. So, not only do I now know that Shepard probably wont die, I learn that it’s possible for everyone else to not die. Fantastic. Happy endings are totally super dramatic.

I mean, this is pretty much the dirty dozen in space, right? Weren’t most of the dirty dozen killed by sniper fire in the final act of the movie? If you’re going to rip off something great, you might as well go all the way, you know what I mean? It kind of sucks that I’ll be able to go into Mass Effect 3 with a Shepard that is fully confident in his ability to pull of the impossible without consequence, since he’s pretty much done it twice already. Being able to pull off a suicide mission without anyone dying elevates Shepard from someone with that “special something” to an absolute god. Considering the back story of my particular instance of “blank” Shepard, it doesn’t even make sense. If I can take an entire collector’s ship without a problem, why did 3/4ths of my crew die in the ruthless Torfan backstory? Surely, if I can easily defeat the greatest threat to mankind, I could have easily beat several squads worth of Batarians (hell, I did it without a problem for a good chunk of ME2). At least, in the first game, we’re forced to make a decision to send one crew member to their death. That had weight. ME2 takes the cheap way out. Since they’re doing that, then ME3’s gotta be a 40+ hour ball-punching session that has almost everyone you love die in your arms while you just barely save the entire galaxy in order to really work as a successful story.