Mass Effect 2 Review

I could literally sum this up in a sentence, actually in a word. Epic. Bioware are blessed to have such a great writing staff on hand because their last few games have been amazingly pieced together with great stories and Mass Effect 2 is no different.

I don't want to spoil the game for anyone so I'll try my best to keep them out.

The Good

• Amazing Storyline

The story was mind blowing to me, it's so much darker than the first and basically begs for the sequel without leaving the player not satisfied.

• Improved Game Mechanics

Bioware have been saying from the beginning that they went back and retooled everything based on player feedback from the first game and it's hard not to see their work. The aiming and guns feel a lot better and more responsive and accurate.

The conversation system has been completely upgraded now to include Paragon/Renegade actions as well as good guy/bad guy conversations. Some of them are really amazing. I think this is the closest they've come to morality and hopefully they can only improve on it for the next game.

• More interesting characters

While Mass Effect 1 had a good crew, the crew of the 2nd are 10x better. They feel more real and I found myself actually wanting to hear what they all had to say instead of just trying to chat up the women (which I did too naturally :P)

• Better side quests

I didn't do a lot of side quests in Mass Effect 1 because they weren't really all that interesting, I guess it's something that Bioware worked on too because they are a lot more impressive in this and some of them could have been a main story in itself.

The Bad
Unfortunately there are some bad parts to the game, most of which isn't really the fault of Bioware but more a platform issue. I can only speak for the Xbox 360 version which is what I played.

• RPG elements are gone

I wonder if EA had anything to do with this. A lot of the RPG elements that made up the first game have either been removed or extremely toned down. Less abilities to level up, health system changed to rechargeable shield system and no visible stats for weapons and only minimal stats on armor.

• Bring back the old UI!

Along with removing the RPG stuff, they've also changed the UI. I can only speak for myself but the I found it nearly impossible to keep track of my teams health. They were either getting hit or dead and I usually only noticed they were dead if they let out a scream. The mail system was a nightmare to go through, sometimes it would skip over buttons, or sometimes it'd be impossible to read the mail since the right stick was too sensitive to scroll through them.

• Loading times

A lot of people were very frustrated by extremely long elevator rides from the first game so Bioware decided to take them out, now instead of looking at extremely long elevator rides, we just get extremely long animated wallpapers. At one point in the game I was having trouble and kept dying which would have been fine except that the game had to load for 40-60 seconds each time it happened which was a nightmare.

• Framerate issues

Thankfully Bioware managed to get rid of the Unreal Engines mascot aka texture popping for this one but there was one major problem towards the end of the game. The framerate of the game goes to 15-17 frames a second at certain sections of the last boss. There was also a problem with the ending cutscene. It switches between pre-rendered and in-game scenes every few seconds which made the pre-rendered scenes stutter when they started.

The Verdict
There are very little problems with Mass Effect and the problems I listed really were only an Xbox problem (I never thought to install the game at the time so next playthrough I'll be doing that to test if those framerate issues are still there) but the game itself storywise and gameplay-wise make it a must have game. I simply can't wait for the third game which is hopefully not that far away. I just hope they take another stab at the UI and maybe add back some of the RPG elements.

Score: 9.5/10