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.
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.