Mass Effect 2 is incredible, a sci-fi adventure masterpiece that should sit alongside the likes of Star Wars as one of the genre greats.

There are some pitfalls here and there, such as concessions made to the RPG aspects of the game in favour of smoothing the clunkier gameplay of the original release of Mass Effect or a variety of content cut short or left unfinished due to either development time limits, console hardware limits (such as DVD size limits on the Xbox 360), or publisher backlash fears (such as Bioware cutting down on the freedom of available companion romance options), but even with all the wondering of what could have been put aside Mass Effect 2 is still a must-play for any fans of sci-fi or RPGs.

This is almost a polar opposite game gameplay wise compared to the first. They god rid of most of the rpg elements in favor of making it more actiony, which, is alright, because the combat is still really fun. The story got a boost tho which is nice, the stakes are higher and more dangerous. Most of the plot is just recruiting members for a suicide mission, so even tho it’s simple, it’s still really good. Most of your party members are fucking fantastic in this game, they really went all out with them, even tho I do think it’s a little too much, the first game had 6, this one has 12 which is actually insane. There are a couple in here that aren’t great, cough cough, Jacob, but otherwise they're all written really well. This is the most popular game in the series, and I can see why, just not for me.

Esse jogo tem uma das melhores aberturas de todos os videogames. Tudo desde o começo até sua primeira entrada em Omega é uma experiência incrível.

Quase tudo é uma grande melhora vindo do 1, apesar de engasgar em alguns pontos. A estrutura de missões torna as coisas muito mais eficientes do que as longas caminhadas que você era obrigado a dar no 1 para qualquer coisa. Super bem vindo apesar de que eu sinto que perde um pouquinho a imersão. A Citadela por exemplo foi reduzida a alguns andares que você explora em 5 minutos. Só pra reiterar: eu prefiro isso porque é realmente um saco ficar andando pra lá e pra cá pra qualquer coisa PORÉM eu me sentia mais imerso vendo como os lugares eram realmente grandes e não só pequenos corredores com backgrounds animados. Ganha uma coisa, perde outra, mas acho que o saldo é positivo.

O inventário do 1 era terrível, aqui eles simplificaram muito e no geral eu prefiro não ter que me importar com stats de armas sim, mas a seleção fica extremamente limitada e você fica HORAS sem trocar de arma. Eu usei o mesmo Assault Rifle o jogo inteiro porque as outras opções eram simplesmente terríveis. E, aliás, eu só pude usar o Assault Rifle graças a ter usado um save editor, porque esse jogo limita severamente suas armas. A classe que eu escolhi só podia usar pistolas e smgs e as duas são terríveis pra combates de longo alcance... felizmente é trivial usar um editor de saves para habilitar mais tipos de armas sem precisar afetar mais nada no jogo.

.......mas não para por aí. Eu ainda optei por usar alguns outros mods. O mais importante de todos foi o de remover completamente os minigames de hacking. Porque alguém que trabalhou na Bioware durante esses jogos tinha muito tesão em fazer você parar a cada 5 minutos numa missão pra jogar um minigame repetido merda. Diferente do 1, aqui tem duas variações muito mais chatas e lerdas de se fazer, que ao falhar te impede de conseguir aquele recurso. Diversão. Também optei por usar um mod que te dá todo o recurso de um planeta com 1 probe porque MEU DEUS DO CÉU esse jogo quer muito que você não jogue ele e fique parado olhando pra tela jogando minigames por horas.

Passado o rant, o jogo é sensacional. O ritmo é intenso, você tá sempre numa missão interessante, já engata mais duas, o horizonte vai se abrindo e você vai recrutando mais gente maluca. Uma ou outra missão meio entediante mas no geral é tudo bem empolgante. O combate é bem mais fluído que do 1, suas habilidades tem atalhos de verdade (falando de controle, teclado sempre teve) e tem utilidade real usar elas, da até pra spammar skills usando certas armaduras. Tudo bem dinâmico e divertido.

No geral, o jogo é simplesmente excelente. Era meu favorito dos 3, preciso rejogar o 3 agora pra confirmar mas até acho difícil deixar de ser. O ritmo da história é realmente um negócio de outro mundo.

Mas preciso só colocar um adendo aqui. Na época em que eu joguei, as DLCs pra PC eram todas vendidas separadas e elas eram todas muito mais caras que o jogo. Coisa de 3x o preço do jogo comprar todas elas. Então eu nunca havia jogado. E meu deus eu preferia que tivesse continuado assim. Para ser justo, a personagem Kasumi que é de DLC é legal e tem uma loyalty mission bem maneira, apesar de eu odiar como eles tratam personagens de DLC, como npcs glorificados, sem as interações do resto do seu time. O Zaeed é... meh. A DLC do Shadow Broker também é excelente.

Agora o resto. Meu amigo.

"Arrival" é uma das coisas mais mal escritas e estúpidas que eu já tive o desprazer de ver. Absolutamente nada faz sentido e a ilusão de escolha é tão cuspida na sua cara que chega a dar nojo. "Firewalker" pega uma funcionalidade que nunca deveria sequer ter existido no primeiro e reintroduz ela só que ainda pior e mais sem graça. "Overlord" pega a mesma funcionalidade de Firewalker e só milka ela muito mais só que de um jeito tão pior que me fez ir atrás de um mod só pra ser aturável jogar essa merda. E no fim a história pra mim não compensou toda a dor de cabeça. 40 horas de jogo, os únicos momentos em que eu não me diverti foram jogando essas DLCs.

Um dos melhores jogos que já joguei. Tirando qualquer coisa relacionada com os nomes que citei no parágrafo anterior.

Tive meu contato com Mass Effect 2 na época que eu tinha um PS3 lá em 2013 ou 2014.
Dessa vez revisitei o jogo com uma melhor mentalidade e julgamento, a experiência não podia ter sido melhor.

Mass Effect 2 é um jogo fantástico, muito bem articulado e produzido.
O enredo é bastante interessante, com personagens bastantes carismáticos e com um background bastante envolvente, o que nos faz criar um vínculo maior com esses personagens.
O sistema de Karma do jogo é uma das mecânicas mais importantes do jogo.
É através dele e de nossas ações que iremos moldar a personalidade principal do(a) nosso (a) Comandante Shepard.

[SEMI SPOILERS A FRENTE]
O último ato do jogo, também conhecida como Missão Suicida, é disparado para mim uma das melhores missões que existe no mundo dos videogames.
Não querendo falar muito para não entregar o ouro, mas é aqui que vemos se as nossas decisões foram boas ou não.
[FIM]

Posso não ter jogado os outros jogos da BioWare, mas eu tenho certeza que provavelmente nada irá superar Mass Effect 2.
Uma obra prima dos RPGs e de jogos de Sci-fi.

Hey gamers


In every way, Mass Effect 2 is better than its predecessor, if not equal.


Most significantly, the combat was a huge improvement. It’s nowhere near perfect, but I no longer dreaded having to fight enemies during my playthrough. It just feels more robust with the sound design, enemy variety, camera motion, and visual feedback. You and your squad mates’ abilities are stronger, more useful, and have fast cooldowns, all of which encouraged me to regularly use them during combat encounters. Your arsenal feels more balanced, and the addition of the heavy weapon was great. I still stuck with the assault rifle most of the time because it was the best weapon in most scenarios, and reloading it is quicker than pulling up the weapon wheel, selecting a different gun, and waiting for Shepard to put the rifle away and pull out a new one.


The characters and conversations were also an improvement. Once again, my favourite parts of the game were speaking with my squad mates and crew members aboard my ship. This eventually turned into a problem for me because I talked to them so often that I ended up exhausting each conversation before the average person would. I feel like it was designed for the player to speak to a few squad mates at a time after every 3-4 missions/assignments, whereas I would do a lap around the entire ship every time I returned. There’s also a large variation of the amount of times that your squad mates will talk to you. Some of them, Mordin for example, are quite chatty. My old pal Garrus, on the other hand, had nothing to say to me for the first and last 10-15 hours of gameplay that he was on the ship, which I found annoying. I also found it disappointing how you can’t progress conversations while a squad mate’s loyalty mission is active and that a few of them only talk via NPC barks instead of scripted conversations.


But anyway, yes, despite my complaining, the conversations were excellent. There are two of them that I remember quite fondly. One was during Mordin’s loyalty mission where you come across the corpse of a female krogan. Here, you see Mordin open up about his spirituality and his guilt in the involvement of the genophage. For a brief moment, I saw past his barrier of timidness, formality, and impersonality and caught a glimpse of his true character. I’ll admit, the first time I met Mordin, I believed he would be the most annoying character in the series, but this encounter I had with him was one of the best moments so far. The other one was the message I received from Ashley. For context, I decided to romance Ashley in the first game, and I also had Shepard tell her that he also believes in God when she spoke about her faith. After their argument on Horizon in this game, Ashley sent a message to my terminal. In it, she apologizes for the argument and says that she prayed over Shepard every day since the events of this game’s prologue and that she misses him. Every few times I visited the terminal, I would reread the message. It was honestly one of the sweetest things I’ve ever seen in any piece of media, and it made me miss having her around in this game.


In terms of the plot, it was… fine? I guess? It’s on the same level as the first game. Like I said, I feel like the characters and the world are extremely strong, but the overarching plot, the force that pushes you into the world in the first place, wasn’t as engaging. Like, upon completing the game, I looked back on the entire journey and realized how little there was going on. This is the entire plot of the game: You find out that the Collectors are going to attack the galaxy. To take the fight to them, you have to build a team of squad mates. Once you do that, the final battle begins, then the game ends. I kinda wish the Collectors had more of a presence or character than they did because this is the driving force of the game, yet they feel secondary compared to everything else. I also thought the final battle was rather anti-climactic. Thankfully, however, the missions where you recruit and earn the loyalty of your squad mates were the best parts of the story, and they took up like 80-90% of the main missions. It seems like this series is at it’s best with its self contained storylines, but struggles to bring them together under a unifying plot. This structure also takes away from any sense of urgency of the Collector threat. It’s a pretty common issue among freely structured games like this because it prevents placing time restrictions on the player. Dunkey said it best in his video on The Witcher 3: “In this game, you play as an all-powerful [Witcher] in a race against time to save the entire world… so here I am playing hide-and-seek with 8-year-olds.”


The additions to the gameplay and mechanics were great as well. I liked probing planets for resources to upgrade my equipment, though I really wish you could sell these resources. Flying your ship in the galaxy map, while adding to the tedium of interplanetary travel, made it a bit more fun. I liked the different outfits available for my squad mates. Earning paragon and renegade points in regular conversations was a neat addition.


Plus, they fixed most of the minor issues that I had with the first game, thankfully. The progression systems are more intuitive, the autosave is better, the Mako sections were tossed, no recycled environments, the equipment management was stripped down, etc.


Although, one last thing I have to mention: Why do you have to take cover behind an object before you can jump onto/over it? I can’t believe this made it into the game, really. If I come across a ledge I need to climb onto, I first have to take my gun out to enter combat mode, take cover behind it, then I can climb onto it. Straight up, why did they do that?


Excellent game despite a few grievances here and there. I’m very excited to dive into the third game.

Mass Effect 2 is heralded as one of the masterpieces of RPGs, and it truly delivers. I played in 2022, and the game still plays well. The FPS combat is smooth and the story is amazing. There are hundreds of videos just on the romance angles. I loved the characters, my favorites being Jack, Liara, Mordin, and Tali. It also has one of my favorite theme songs, the suicide mission. If I have to nitpick, the game lacks a variety of spells and items. Otherwise, this is a must-play, even 10 years later.

This game really left an impact after I played the first one - the opening sequence alone got me invested and I was impressed at the improvement from 1 to 2 in basically every aspect. The visuals are better, the gameplay is for the most part better, and the plot is better.

The squad is full of very interesting characters with different backstories and motives, and even for the ones I didn’t like much I was interested in figuring out their background and doing their loyalty missions. The loyalty missions are satisfyingly varied which I appreciated as well.

Most of the missions in general are snappy and quick, making them less daunting than in the first game. After spending so much time driving the Mako around, I was thankful BioWare realized this part of the first game was super boring and made the Hammerhead missions quick and straightforward. The only missions where the driving took a long time was the DLC mission with the rogue VI, but that was ok in the grand scheme of the game.

The gameplay itself is more interesting than the first game, particularly the inability to power heal through bad tactics. I died a lot more in this game and it made me have to interface with the mechanics and specific talents more than I did before, which made me appreciate the game design and variety more than before as well. I do miss the quantity of skills I had in the first game, but I can appreciate the decision to focus more. I didn’t end up engaging with the customized armour or weapons as much, partly because the customized armor was really ugly and because there didn’t seem to be a lot of options to choose from anyhow. The planetary exploration part of the game was also more interesting, with the fuel and probe system, although by the end of the game I was pretty finished with that as well and left large areas unexplored.

The structure of the game orienting effectively around one large mission was very cool to me. The number of things that can change on the final mission is very cool and even though I had set everything up for success, I still was worried that I might have forgotten something or made a wrong turn and it kept me on edge, in a satisfying way.

The plot and dialogue as a whole was written really well - I was worried playing the first game that maybe the trilogy wouldn’t fully click with me, but after playing this second one I realized there are large differences in how the story is told that I appreciate.

My one main gripe with the game, which is small but still an issue, is that the auto-saves are bugged and it meant I had to spend extra time redoing missions at times which really threw me for a loop. If you die at the same time as a big enemy, which weirdly can happen somewhat often, the game deletes your old auto save but can’t then save your new auto save, meaning you have to reload your last full save or the very start of the mission you are on. While the missions are snappy, they can still be 30-45 minutes long and it was a real buzzkill when this happened. I got in the habit of manually saving very regularly because of this, but don’t think I should have needed to.

The dialogue trees from the first game also still, with few exceptions, encourage you to hyper focus in only one direction (Paragon or Renegade), which seems to oversimplify a lot of decision making. I found myself constantly picking the upper left or upper right options to keep my Paragon score going so that I’d have the blue options available when I needed them. I did notice a small handful of scenarios where only a blue or a red option was available, and I wish more of those were in the game to encourage some investment in both angles, and somewhat break you a little from hyper investing in one direction.

Other than those two issues, an incredibly good game that I’m impressed ran on an Xbox 360!

I'm left amazed at the vast improvement Mass Effect 2 is. The core gameplay has been refined and tweaked to make the firefights and biotic slinging that much more impactful. Along with some superb storytelling. From the bombastic opening, I was hooked more into this game than I was in the first game which left a sour taste in my mouth coming into this game. I thought of this game more like a training arc between the first game and the second game that allowed me to truly explore the galaxy at my leisure. Being able to see the slums of Omega to the Love Hotels of Illum made the galaxy feel as full of life as it implied.

Mass Effect 2 is how you handle a sequel. In fact, it might be one of the greatest jumps in quality from one game to the next I've ever seen. It doesn't opt for the "bigger is better" approach that many sequels take, instead seeking to streamline what worked in the first game while ditching what didn't. In the process, it became a much more focused and enjoyable experience. It concerned itself less with being a subpar KOTOR and doubled down on being what it was really meant to be: a very solid Gearslike. I described the first Mass Effect as being a product of its time in the negative sense, whereas Mass Effect 2 is an example of how that phrase now can be used as a positive: If you're going to borrow from the best of the era, why not the pre-eminent third-person cover shooter that is Gears of War?

In addition to being a much more enjoyable shooter (god damn did they ever improve the feel and sounds of those guns, it makes a huge difference) Mass Effect 2 also nails its tone and setting in a way that makes the first game feel like a Playskool title. It's dark, it's grungy, it's seedy - it's all the little things you really want in a game that traffics in space fantasy. Hell, the massively improved lighting alone does a world of good in setting ME2's atmosphere. From the moment that first setpiece kicks off you know you're playing something that looks and feels much better than what came before.

Then you have your new squadmates. Top to bottom they are far more interesting and complex characters than the majority of their ME1 counterparts, and bring with them problems and scenarios that actually put the morals of your character to the test. This couples nicely with having Shepard be ingrained within a terrorist organization instead of a military one, giving you a more ambiguous but difficult situation to navigate. Also, somewhat surprising to me after my experience with the first game, this setup gave me far more avenues in which I felt like I was genuinely role-playing my character. Being able to play Space Punisher instead of different shades of Space Cop made a world of difference.

Very excited to see how they bungle all this in Mass Effect 3.