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Written by Russ Crandall
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Thursday, 18 February 2010 18:14 |
Someone pat me on the back. I finished Mass Effect 2 yesterday, in only five days, and I journaled every bit of it. It was a great ride, and I'm glad that I played it all in one chunk of time. Playing it in one fell swoop also gave me some insight into the series as a whole, and some things I might have missed had I broken the experience up into different time chunks.
These are my main three points, which although are not fundamentally spoilerific, may lead to a less fun experience if you haven't played the game already. Yeah, that's my disclaimer.
POLISH:
Not to be confused with people from Poland, or something that's similar to a pole in the ground, I thought this game had an incredible amount of polish. I occasionally found myself getting stuck on a rock cropping, and there were a few weird conversational glitches, but other than that, I found no bugs in the game. That's pretty incredible considering I just spent 36 hours or so with the experience. Not only that, but this game's minute little elements make games like Fallout 3 (which admittedly has a greater scope and level of immersion) look like a last-gen game in terms of smoothness of play. Everything just screamed 80's sci-fi artistic style, and it felt like I was part of something monumental.
GAMEPLAY:
I'm not sure if this game should be classified as an RPG; rather, I'm more comfortable with the term, "really long action game". A fundamental element of RPGs is gaining experience through fighting enemies with a limited but increasing arsenal of hit points and weapons. This element is so far hidden in Mass Effect 2 that I'm not really sure if it's there at all. You don't get experience for beating enemies; you get it for beating missions. Your only indication of whether a weapon is better than another is its description - there are no numbers to crunch at all. While I applaud the game's newfound ease of use, I would have preferred an option between playing the game as an action game, or turning on RPG elements.
I really want to see what a quarian looks like under the mask.
Along those same lines, it felt like some of the gameplay itself was neutered to quell fanboy criticisms. A lot of people complained about the sheer amount of driving done in the first game, and how uneasy we all felt behind the wheel. I can understand tweaking the driving a little, or making less of it, but taking it out altogether? It seems like BioWare just gave up on an element of the trilogy rather than work harder on it. Finally, the romance scenes. I couldn't understand the controversy over the slight side-boob of the first Mass Effect, and the backlash it faced. But toning it down further (by leaps and bounds, if you ask me) not only made BioWare look like they're pandering to mass media buzz, but it made the romance less rewarding. Not that I wanted to be rewarded by boobs. Or maybe I did. Okay, I'll stop there.
DEPTH AND VARIETY:
In retrospect, I don't think this was a very deep game. And a lot of that I attribute to the fact that you know your next moves so far ahead of actually doing them. This game has two movements; you gather an initial team and do a couple missions, and then you gather the rest of your team and finish the mission you started initially. Really, I could have predicted most of the overarching storyline before even playing this second game. And that's fine, because it's a wonderful and engaging story that has my interest piqued. But I'll be damned if I didn't look at my galaxy map with a frumpy "dayaamn" when I could see all of the people I still needed to recruit, and then think of all of their loyalty quests. I would be overwhelmed with the feeling that the game itself wasn't taking me to far-reaching places; it was one story that was really drawn out.
Was it just me, or did Miranda look a little creepy? Something about those eyes.
Another culprit leading to this sensation was the fact that although the gameplay features an awesome amount of depth (the staging for each firefight was incredibly diverse and fun), the main quests weren't too varied. Sure, you play as a minor character for a little bit, and the sidequests are varied and engaging, but the predictability of the recruiting and loyalty quests grew tiring about five characters in. Problem is, there were eleven characters to recruit.
Don't get me wrong - this game was a lot of fun and these minor gripes don't overly hinder the playing experience. Overall, it's one of my favorite games of recent memory, and I can't wait to try another playthrough in a year or so.
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Mass Effect Journal: Day One
Mass Effect Journal: Day Two
Mass Effect Journal: Day Three
Mass Effect Journal: Day Four
Mass Effect Journal: Day Five
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