Reviewed in the United States on March 18, 2011
In 2007, the RPG genre was shaken at its very roots, by a studio we thought had done their part in forming that particular aspect of gaming. Bioware, the potential grandparents of Role-Playing Games, and the creators of Star Wars: Knights of The Old Republic and Neverwinter Nights, decided to give us a glimpse of the future of RPGs. Mass Effect, breaking all genre standards, managed to fuse an extremely intelligent narrative and complex role play with the mechanics of a fierce shooter, complete with mind blowing attention to detail and a ridiculous sense of scale. Success was practically imminent: after enduring a harshly positive welcome from both the gamers and the press, Mass Effect became a living legend, albeit with numerous flaws that made the gameplay less fluent then it should have been.
And for the first time, Bioware decided to personally develop the continuation to perfection (all their previous "sequels", including the ones for the aforementioned KoTOR and NWN series, were made by their backup studio, namely, Obsidian), aiming for a darker middle act in the planned trilogy. After a somewhat funny development period (around 2 years, technically) and a marketing campaign bursting from hype, Mass Effect 2 went gold. Press-release versions received numerous scores of 10 even before the game was launched for general public, and CNN declared it the "Avatar of video games". Was it even logical to assume that ME2 would fail? It still isn't.
The first thing that becomes clear is that the developers truly set the Utopian style of the first game aside. The very opening sequence will make you watch as the Normandy, the iconic vessel of Commander Shepard, gets completely annihilated by an unknown ship. After brief heroics and some self-sacrifice, the main hero gets blown away into open space, his suit ruptured, his ship gone, and half of the crew dead. Right in front of our eyes, Commander Shepard dies.
As much as this element may work for a compelling storyline, it's more likely that Bioware just needed another excuse to give the players a chance to "rebuild" Shepard (that is, to choose the gender, backstory, and appearance of the protagonist) albeit a bit more literally in ME2 that it was in the first game. After having his corpse salvaged by the infamous pro-humanist organization, Cerberus, and undergoing a 2-year long reconstruction, Shepard gets revived thanks to Project Lazarus, a Cerberus division focused solely on bringing humanity's greatest hero back to life. Shortly after, the Illusive Man, the mysterious leader of the rogue militia who believes in Shepard as an icon, offers his help in defeating the Collectors, a powerful (and a more immediate, for as far as we know, the Reapers are still snoring somewhere in dark space) new foe abducting human colonies (who also happen to be the ones responsible for Shepard's "death"). Not having much of a choice, Shepard accepts his proposition, and gets a new Normandy SR-2 as a bonus.
There is one ultimate goal to pursue: find and recruit the deadliest killers in the Galaxy, and then go guns blazing through the mysterious Omega-4 Relay and assault the base of the Collectors. No easy task, considering that Shepard has lost all authority since being declared as MIA by the Citadel Council. That's basically what you'll be doing all the time (aside from the side quests of course - but that's another talk), meaning that the story is much more straightforward and predictable, with the main focus lying on the interactions between characters, rather than epic plot turns and revelations. It may not compare to the scale of the drama in Mass Effect 1, but fits more than enough to the tone of the sequel, really setting the ground for the grand finale.
And you'll excuse me for devoting another paragraph to characters, because like any Bioware game, they are the moving force of everything. The aliens you recruit range from your typical badass merc to a cloned krogan with morality problems. There even is a deeply religious drell (a new race in Mass Effect, amphibian humanoids capable of reliving their every memory with striking accuracy) assassin having family difficulties. And each of these unique personalities can be explored through all those unnecessary but brilliantly written dialogues only Mass Effect can deliver. Without spoiling anything else, I will only say that standing from my point of view, ME2 is the perfect sequel for a trilogy: dark, more brutal, a bit more predictable and even psychologically engaging.
But avid fanboys excluded, nobody really cared for flaws in the story because we knew Bioware had it all planned years ago, and they wouldn't trip over the key point of their expertise. The main suspicion that sneaked through all that hype was in regards of the mechanics: Mass Effect maintained an almost perfect balance of RPG and Action, but had devastating repetitiveness issues and was generally unsettling to hardcore gamers preferring only one genre of the aforementioned. A gateway game, no doubt, but needing perfection. Mass Effect 2 manages this, but not without some trickery.
The general outline includes wandering through your new, upgraded ship (which now has four stories, complete with a separate cabin for your captain needs and a widened CIC with a spectacular new Galaxy Map), observing your teammates spill their guts before you as they confess in their past deeds, upgrading and customizing your accessories, and having some personal fun (like buying a space hamster, or forgetting to feed your newly acquired fish). When you're done gaining a quest to find brandy for the ship's doctor, you can fire up the Galaxy Map and plot a course to a key system, pick your team and weapons (the latter remain "unchangeable" until the mission ends) and go save the day. Loop point.
Now as for the details, the first and foremost fear we had was for the RPG counterpart of the game. Sadly, the role playing is obviously downscaled, dramatically, and that is an unarguable fact. The inventory is gone (strike one), armor and weapon upgrades now exist as simple passive or active skill powers. Skills themselves are also quite reduced, mainly because no charm or intimidate is needed to affect bonus responses in dialogues anymore, it's purely dependent on your Paragon/Renegade level. Instead of swapping full armor sets, we cycle through different segments which grant additional bonuses. Upgrades are brought at various stores and/or researched on the Normandy's tech lab, and include improvements to armor, weapon, tech or biotic skills. Which ultimately leads us to the wide range of specialties to choose from.
No changes here, we still have the six main character classes available: Soldier, Adept, Engineer, Vanguard, Sentinel, and Infiltrator. And while the first three utilize only one of the few offensive options available in Mass Effect (employing tech powers to hack and manipulate synthetic enemies, going Star-Wars with biotic abilities or just shooting everything in sight), the rest are smart, versatile mixes which make for a tremendous replay value. Because Mass Effect 2 has also improved one pretty nasty flaw of its predecessor: the classes actually vary.
Mainly that tends to happen due to some really neat bonus powers for each specialty. Infiltrators can cloak themselves invisible, while Sentinels prefer to deploy tech shields. Engineer have a handy new combat drone as a wonderful decoy for half-witted mercs, but the fan favorite addition is definitely the (bull) Charge of the Vanguard, allowing for some tactical escapes or melee-friendly scenarios. However, while power management is more or less based on the same structure which was created in ME1, combat is virtually swapped with a better, more intuitive system, allowing for smoother covering and a sharper response from the targeting reticule. The overall process doesn't reach the heights of Gears of War with its horizontal cover swaps, but approaches close enough, which is more than unusual to witness in RPGs, let alone from Bioware (we all know that shooting in ME1 was more sloppy than fun).
It all comes down to yet another unarguable fact: ironically, the vast simplification of the RPG system had a polar effect on the combat. Another example: with assembling your own team of murderers being the game's top priority, squad tactics have been improved as well. You can still take two characters with you - each loaded with two specific weapon types and 3 skill powers (they get another one if you decide to gain their loyalty via a personal side quest). You can relay specific orders, like attack/take cover/move to/regroup with just a couple of buttons, but even without that, squad (as well as enemy) AI is brilliant in figuring out its own ways of achieving tactical supremacy. They may even give YOU hints on possible flanking options.
Speaking of enemies, the bunch had gotten a wider variation this time around. Adding up to the traditional mercs and geth are defense mechs (you can shoot their legs off; they'll keep on crawling at you), "upgraded" husks which learned to zig-zag their way to a comfortable melee position (honestly speaking, I never thought that space zombies would ever become the major thorn in the side for an Action/RPG), mini-bosses like Scions and Praetorians who achieve this status in a bizarre way: they are both slow and dumb, its just the health/damage ratio that keeps you at bay. There also are successors to Rachni called "Klixen" (practically the same cross between a bug and a crab), who are deployed on field by a dragony-creature impervious to weapon fire. And then there's the cameos of the Thresher Maw and Geth Colossus, albeit this time they're full-scale bosses you need to take down on foot.
There actually is no other way of taking on your foes at all. The disastrous Mako concept of Mass Effect 1 was trashed, and the number of explorable planets has been drastically reduced to about 15, but every mission has a unique touch, sometimes even puzzles occur (yet another rare element for a RPG). Nevertheless, the general environmental downscale can be felt through as well: the Citadel has become one Ward with half a dozen areas, the much anticipated Omega consists of a spacious club and some lower apartments, and the quarian flotilla seems more than a bit untrue to its description in the prequel novel. At least the Galaxy Map still gives the illusion of universal freedom, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Where else can you explore whole systems well beyond the main storyline?
But still, illusions aside, that's precisely where the main problem of Mass Effect 2 lies. Bioware didn't actually trash the Mako, they recycled it. You may not land on random planets this time around, but apart from credits you'll need to obtain certain minerals for upgrading your ship. The "handy" planet scanning may sound interesting at first, but the damage it does to the flow of the gameplay is catastrophic; the Mako at least incorporated freeroam, a dynamic sense of playing.
Truth be told, Mass Effect 2 did fall off that perfect balance of Action/RPG, bending a good deal towards the former and stripping the latter of some deeply needed mechanics. But Bioware has a very interesting way of interpreting the meaning of the word "sequel": while games like Assassin's Creed II or Left 4 Dead 2 improved upon the old formula, the team behind ME2 created a new experience from the ground up, fine-tuning the combat and even granting bonuses to people who've played the first part: if you happen to have a savegame of Mass Effect on your hard drive, you can import your character and start a new game where your past choices will have direct repercussions, some of them minor, others - pleasantly vast (no spoilers here, but yes, the latter involves Wrex). It also gives you a bonus amount of resources so that you can ignore the creepy scanner for at least a few hours into the game.
The only thing Bioware treated with explicit care and made minimal changes to are the dialogues, which now have a new feature called the Interrupt: it's a mid-conversation action which can be triggered at specific times to make Shepard do a bold move (throw a merc from a skyscraper, calm a crazed hostage, or maybe even drop a cargo container on a bunch of mechs). The system itself is still that handy wheel of choices: the main area where you gain Paragon or Renegade points, and the main area where you utilize them. Because sometimes, choices made in conversations can affect the lives of none other than your teammates.
In the end, there is only one definite verdict to Mass Effect 2's gameplay: it is better than the original, and it's still nothing like you've ever seen before. Making a world this rich more user-friendly and accessible to general public was technically the logical way to go for Bioware, but a lot of hardcore RPG gamers will be left with mouths wide open at the absence of the depth needed for a game to carry that definition. But, there's always one but when it comes down to Mass Effect: it's unique.
And nothing shows that better than the presentation. ME1 was gorgeous in every detail, starting from a striking, fresh art direction and ending with breathtaking visuals crushing every fundamental graphics standard in RPGs. I am glad to state that mostly, the situation in Mass Effect 2 pretty much repeats its predecessor.
The technical side is as improved as any sequel can be: the models are astonishingly sharp and every texture looks (and IS) bumpmapped to perfection. The lifelike faces of the main characters hold to close-ups as good as in any other AAA-class First Person game, and every small chunk of galactic district is modeled with breathtaking realism and attention to detail. And what Bioware do with lighting is simply hard to put together at all. Combined with a masterful optimization (though graphics options are actually simplified, but still), Mass Effect 2 will most likely give you the most full vision of the future than any other form of entertainment, be it a movie or a book.
A bit more about the art direction. The imaginative force behind the series was gigantic from the start: Mass Effect looked and felt as fresh as Star Wars did back in the 70s, and that's not an understatement. While there was nothing much new to bring in the second part, developers still managed to incorporate some darker tones and enough originality for the visuals to gleam with style. It is a world unlike any other, and is guaranteed to suck any sci-fi geek head-on with its complete creativity. No aspect seems to be borrowed from another work, a seldom advantage of any great title.
As for the animations, they are good, mostly because practically all of them were mocaped from the ground-up; the facial AI-controlled mimics work even better than the first part, creating believable characters which will make you think bad things about Fallout 3. Every alien, be it the vaguely humanoid batarians or the avian turians, move and act just as you'd expect them to in real life (the effect is actually creepy sometimes). It is a striking advantage that is yet another exclusive superiority of the series: emotionality which not only can be heard, but shown. Especially with dialogues like in Mass Effect 2, having static RPG NPCs with basic jaw movement as the only facial action would be a definite failure.
Regardless of the aforementioned appraisal, what makes this game look down at the rest of the industry is definitely the voice acting. Apart from Mark Meer, Seth Green and Keith David, who have already appeared in the previous title, ME2 is proudly filled with names like Adam Baldwin, Tricia Helfer, Carrie-Anne Moss, and many more who are not just there for the show. The outrageous amount of voiceover is practically crying for an Oscar on best acting, however strange it may sound for a videogame. And Martin Sheen's Illusive Man was most definitely one of the greatest villains to appear in RPGs for a long time - a character both charismatic, positively motivated but also convinced that the ends always justify the means. No easy role to play. And such examples come in dozens.
Rounding up the audio goodness is Jack Wall's new soundtrack, completely crowning the experience by reaching Hollywood heights and beyond. The wacky mix of cold, electronic tunes and orchestral pieces combined with some memorable themes from Mass Effect 1 are sure to please anyone with some taste at music.
There will be many pretensions to this year's best (at least one of) Role-Playing... let's call it Action games. Yes, it did make that huge step from hours of inventory micromanagement and focused on adrenaline-filled gunplay, but apart from this disbalance, it is still the Mass Effect we loved and missed: the futuristic cityscapes, mysterious enemies, a living, breathing world filled with believable aliens and a scale of events ranging from personal drama to the obvious battle for humanity and (eventually) the Galaxy. Bioware successfully incorporated a darked out piece to the trilogy, and now it's up to them to deliver a worthy conclusion. For as far as we already know, the third part will end the adventures of Commander Shepard permanently, one way or another. Meanwhile, you can enjoy gunning down Collectors, doing a speedrun for the third playthrough (trust me, I wasn't tempted at first as well), and desperately wait for the numerous DLCs planned through this year.
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