Mass Effect is to Video Games what A New Hope is to film. Bioware polishes their Knights of the Old Republic template to an immaculate shine, but they also craft a story with seamless world-building, unforgettable characters and overall writing and acting quality that constantly managed to surprise me. Whatever the series would become, Mass Effect stands alone is an engaging role playing experience everyone should play.

Mass Effect 2 goes from emulating the structure and themes of A New Hope to something totally unique: an episodic, interpersonal, character-driven story where the real adventure really is the friends we make along the way.

More than this, the role-playing aspect is more focused here than in Mass Effect, limiting the total potential number of possible "shades" of Shepard, but giving the player more maneuverability within those shades. This might sound like a drawback -- fewer versions of Shepard to play as -- but in Mass Effect, a mostly-paragon Shepard would have been incentivized to keep playing as that version of Shepard, lest they accidentally become a petulant, mostly irredeemable Shepard; this could create some serious disconnect for the player. The reduced extremity in how Shepard can be characterized in *2 allows much more player control over the kind of Shepard they want to role-play as, sometimes renegade, sometimes paragon. If you even liked Mass Effect*, you will love this.

Not being as good as ME2 doesn't make this a bad game. Especially with all the DLC. The gameplay itself is hugely improved. I think the hate is overblown.

A unique experience to video games as a medium. I consider this a must-play for all serious gamers.

Fun game. As a friend of mine said, "A great game hidden within a good game." You owe it to yourself to get the "canon" ending. Good way to spend a weekend. I like Rome. I just wish these actor weren't British. Their pronunciation of Latin makes my ears bleed.

Fixes only some of the issues with the original, requires platform paid services (Xbox Live Gold, Playstation Plus) to enjoy the online features, and underneath it all the game is still ludicrously unbalanced in terms of quality and quality-of-life options. Good port, could've been better.

Performance issues, lack of polish and quality control doesn't stop the first half of this game from being SO GOOD people still talk about it as if it's the best in the series almost two decades later. And they're almost right, because the first half of the game is genuinely excellent. But just play DS3 if the bullshit puts you off, that game is better.

More consistent than Dark Souls but with none of the quality spikes that first game had. This version is MUCH better than any of the Scholar of the First Sin versions simply due to the enemy placement.

Great game with some short-sighted design decisions. Healing system needed to be reexamined, as well as most of the flailing-monster boss archetypes. It'll piss you off, but you'll still want to beat it.

Uncharted has always sucked but this one only marginally less than the others. Play better games.

A sequel that makes so many baffling design decisions that it makes me question if the first game was an accident.

If you play on PC to improve load times, mod out the more annoying aspects of the gameplay, improve the character creation process and NPC appearances across the board, play on the easiest difficulty and maybe smoke some weed, you can just barely glean the shadows of old Bioware greatness dancing on the cavern walls. If you don't do any of that, the game is unplayable.

I put this game down for a year before realizing how good it was. I wrote it off as highly repetitive and contextually-uninteresting, but the gameplay won me over as I began to really understand how the boons all play off each other and how the game uses its main mechanic as part of the story. Also I love Megaera.