Also one of my favourites. Does a lot of things better than 1. Everyone else has probably talked about all the things I love about the game in a more articulate manner than I could so I wanna share something I realised the last time I played this that I haven’t seen many other people mention.

I LOVE how simple the story is here. Almost immediately from the outset you know what your end goal is; the suicide mission. The entire game is building towards that goal, constantly reminding you of the severity of that mission. It’s really lean and very effective. It leaves things open for more intimate stories throughout the rest of the game, and it stresses the importance of the suicide mission. I love it, so.

One more thing; I genuinely like the mining mini game. It’s very therapeutic.

I've heard this game called "one of the best rpgs of all time" and after playing it I feel like I have to be missing something. The main cast and their individual missions are generally pretty good, yes, but the main story just isn't. The collectors/reapers are not an interesting enemy and are never really explored and stuff kind of just happens to create drama. It feels like there had to have been different writing teams working on the character missions and the main "plot" missions. The gameplay is a generic 7th gen third person cover shooter and hasn't aged very well. Thane and Mordin are my goats though shoutouts to whoever came up with them raddio out

if the first game is greater than the sum of its parts, this game has the proper parts to make up the sum.

way dialed back on arbitrary half-assed rpg mechanics that add nothing to the game, fat is trimmed on fluff filler content, gunplay and control is exponentially improved, and all the substantial content is highly centralized where you will actually access it.

the first game sets up an amazing setting with beautiful characters, with fun but rudimentary gameplay and a central story which feels a bit disjointed at times. here you actually have that tight shooter action and cohesive central narrative to support that secret sauce.

the more i fall in love with these games as i go, the more depressed i get about the inevitable development hell and studio collapse story to come with mass effect 4

This game has a massive scope but is still so laser focused, for both good and bad. This game has a new combat system which I feel is much more simple to learn, at the cost of the deeper control over ur party, streamlining in a pretty acceptable way. No more struggling thru menus equipping ur party with species specific armour or micromanaging their weapon mods, bullet types, packing their lunches, giving them a kiss on the cheek (that one was saved special for Ashley only! oo lala!! <3 my wife Ashley! hooray!) a lot of the RPG stuff was changed in favour of a more straightforward buy shit with coins and resources from probing planets, companions are more focused and have less upgradeable skills, weapons were found lying around in mission areas, and its pretty good for letting the player spend less time on a menu. Everything is focused on the shooting, kind of like how focused I am when I'm watching an episode of suits on netflix.

... To a fault. Pretty much every mission mechanically goes the same; go inside a room, sit behind the cover closest to the door, do a 3 minute wave shooting bit until it gets boring and then one of your companions yell CLEAR and you move to the next room. Maybe you'll press a button or do a hacking game. But that's pretty much how it'll go for the whole time you're playing. It's like red dead redemption 2, but at least red dead 2 had the decency to let you go on a hot air balloon or go fuck off and fish for 3 real life days. It gets to the point where there's one tailing mission and I was fucking ENJOYING THAT SHIT. Tali's quest was the absolute worst, spoilers for tali's loyalty quest but she gets framed for a crime, you go onto the flotilla (COOL AF TO SEE IT BUT ITS LIKE TWO ROOMS.) You speak to the judges and nothing you say convinces them. She is said to have brought geth onboard, and they reactivated. She says she didn't know it would do that, one guy says "it doesn't matter if you did it purposely its still a crime by negligence" which is true, according to my legal knowledge. You can't really defend her in any way, you can tell them "your honour she fought geth all the time" they say IDC. So to prove her innocence, they make her.... go to the infected ship in the fleet and kill all the geth. Rly? she needs to kill geth to prove herself? like she hasn't killed enough? whatever, stupid logic, but whatever. Cue another identical 20 minute shooting gallery. Come back. Go up to the court again. They still don't believe. Blue dialogue option pops up. I click it. Patriotic American music starts playing and reginald shepard reiterates what he said before he did the 20 minute shooting gallery. Forgoing the interesting-ish ethical dilemma between throwing her father's legacy under the bus or getting her exiled from the fleet for good. Committing space perjury aside, that was a cool ass idea for a mission completely wasted and that was just another one of the other missions I did room for room but wearing the dead carcass of an episode of suits on netflix.

The repetitive nature of the gameplay was doubled down by the lack of healing. The description on backloggd says they removed the healing gel system to focus on making you regen behind cover, which is a assface move. You have to grind health and shield and damage upgrades with money or resources, so you can do more damage for more time before you have to go back into cover for less time. Getting these resources is done in the space menu. The only other gameplay type being just getting resources from a menu or walking around the normandy can get old, it came to the point where I missed the mako parts or the long and bordering-on-tedious fetch quests in places like the citadel. There are more areas like the citadel in this game, but they're less detailed and connected. The dead, mostly empty planets from ME1 were kind of pointless and repetitive, but it made the universe feel pretty big and had a cool sense of loneliness and scale, y’know? I had a lot of solemn and wistful and cool and quiet moments just walking around on these empty planets, heading to an artifact I saw on the map. But that’s mostly gone in 2. It got to the point where I could only do one or two missions before getting bored and watching an episode of suits on netflix.

I’ve been hard as fuck on this game tho, haven’t I? I gave this a 4.5/5, one of the best scores I could give anything. So I’m gonna say some nice things about this game. 9 aspects out of 10, this makes mass effect 1 look like a tech demo. More companions, all of them have deep stories and fun conversations, they have unique weapon combos and special moves, they interact in unique ways with the environment and you can have full conversations with them about shit you see on planets. The companions themselves are great. Mordin was so charming I completely forgave him for all the genocide he did. Jack is cool and was a nice rebound for me after my ex wife Ashley broke up with me for being in cerberus. NOT MY CHOICE, ASH. I just woke up and they told me to do shit. What was I gonna do? Cerberus brought me into this world, they’re like my mom now. Speaking of mom, Samara had me sitting there asking about every last aspect of her culture and heritage because I actually cared. Justicars are cool as hell and Mass Effect has got to have the coolest fictional lore of any universe because I was sitting there reading every codex entry, pointing out in-universe consistencies in my mind, and they went all in on fleshing the world out. The shadow broker’s computer has info on all your companions and allies, and you can see their internet history. It is very illuminating. Legion is a big gamer and Miranda goes on dating sites but asks for her matches’ medical history via PDF before conversing in any way. Weirdo!! Jack likes poetry which is why I rebounded with her, cus Ashley liked poetry too. Kasumi also wrote poetry but hers is cringy and I didn’t like her. And as much as I talked about many missions blending together, the ones that manage to rise above and overcome their genetic makeup to be varied and cool are amazing. Mostly the DLC stuff. The first half of the shadow broker Liara mission is amazing. The project overlord is amazing. Thane’s loyalty quest is amazing (and you don’t even shoot a single bullet in that one. Huh. Imagine that.) And same with Samara’s. That shit had enough melodrama and tight, witty dialogue to have the makings of an episode of suits on netflix.

The suicide mission at the end there is, by far, no holds barred, one of my favourite missions of any videogame i’ve played in my career. That thing had such palpable buildup throughout the whole game. The structure of the whole of mass effect 2 was finding people in this universe who are loyal or crazy enough to do that shit with you, and by the end you feel like you want everyone to make it. While I was doing it, every close call in a cutscene felt genuinely tense because I knew there were stakes and I knew this would carry over in ME3. Some parts had me flashing back and forth to my adventures with these crazy dorks. Heh. I remember last week I was checking up on Tali. I really didn’t like Tali in mass effect 1. She was really shallow and weak, and every word out of her mouth was about “her people” this or “her people” that. People make fun of me for dating Ashley who is just a teensy weensy bit racist but at least she has a personality. She’s racist, but Tali was just her race. Now? She’s probably my favourite character. She really came into her own and the expanded scope helped her be more fleshed out and less ‘Expository McTell-the-player-about-quarians-and-have-no-room-for-personality’. I could never romance her though, but I see her like a daughter. Which is really weird when mass effect did its mass effect thing and one of my random kind platonic dialogue options had Shepard say the nastiest grossest sex thing of all time. Which I walked back on in our next conversation. Phew, right? Saved? Not so much. You see, my friend who told me to play these games romanced Tali and I'm facing him in a heated bro code court battle right now. He agreed not to romance lae’zel, but now that I flirted with tali ACCIDENTALLY, he wants full rights to go after my baldur’s gate wife like it’s nothing. This is getting out of hand, this whole thing is playing out like an episode of suits on netflix.