Negative Gamer Review: Mass Effect 2 (PC)

Mass Effect 2 continues the story of series protagonist Commander Shepard in what has to be the most direct way possible. Where the original gave the player a sense of consequence through the immediate effects of their choices, Mass Effect 2 takes a more long term approach. As well as the direct consequences of your next action, Mass Effect 2 regularly reminds the player of how influential their actions in the first game were. The ability to import a character from the original game only serves to emphasise how Mass Effect 2 revels in its own backstory.

Although the sci-fi setting and story remain intact, the core mechanics have been drastically altered. Mass Effect 2 retains the character building RPG mechanics of the original but makes significant changes to the combat. Encounters take the form of leading a three-man squad through cover-based gunfights. You can still employ special attacks and the different classes have significantly different abilities but the combat has more in common with Gears Of War than Baldur’s Gate. Both entries in the franchise sit firmly in the action-RPG genre but Mass Effect 2 swings pretty far into the action side of things.

Stop, pop and roll

Mass Effect 2 can be boiled down to two courses of action; talking or shooting. The dialogue system from Mass Effect remains the same, conversations can be steered down a number of different paths depending on the player’s choices. I found the conversations almost universally satisfying to progress through. Although I didn’t find the shooting to be particularly bad in any specific way, it didn’t feel quite as refined as the dialogue.

Divorced from the detailed and subtle interactions with other characters, the shooting in Mass Effect 2 wasn’t entirely to my taste. The basics are fine, weapons provide a decent amount of feedback and some of the special abilities can be very effective and a lot of fun to use. The problems arise in the subtleties of how your characters gets in and out of cover. I found the cover system occasionally frustrating and sometimes I just couldn’t seem to snap in and out of cover as quickly as I needed to. The best cover systems give the player a sense that they can effortlessly shift between taking cover and moving freely. Mass Effect 2 just doesn’t capture that feeling.

Now everyone hold your buddy’s hand and don’t retreat until teacher tells you to

Whilst the imperfections in the general shooting mechanics were small enough that I didn’t feel handicapped by them, the imperfections in squad management were more noticeable. Each mission involves bringing two non-playable characters along for the ride and by the end of the game, I felt like more of a babysitter than a leader of men (or women, or whatever the hell you call an Asari).  They’ll shoot at enemies and make use of their special abilities but that’s about all they can do. Any time there was a long and winding path between two encounters my companions seemed incapable of keeping up with me. They also didn’t seem to prioritise enemies particularly well, sometimes they failed to kill the enemies that had flanked us and focused on the ones in the distance.

The AI controlled squad members of Mass Effect 2 aren’t awful, too much effort was put in to the production values of this game for that to be true. They’re just disappointing in most situations outside of a slim corridor with the enemies at a distance.

New from EA: Mass Effect Party!

As I played through Mass Effect 2, I quickly tired of the three different minigames that it throws up periodically. Each one accompanies a specific action and correspond to mining, hacking and lockpicking. Lockpicking and hacking are both simple matching games and mining involves dragging a cursor across a planet’s surface until a meter spikes and launching a probe to extract certain minerals. The mining clearly serves a purpose and allows patient players to break the game’s internal economy if they want to. It’s the same central philosophy as optional grinding in a conventional RPG.

The hacking and lockpicking minigames are much more frequent and often feel unnecessary. I found these minigames so easy that they just became arbitrary barriers between me and some extra cash. Occasionally they would pop up as I moved through a mission, barring me from entrance to the next  part of the level. I really can’t stress enough how dull and pointless these minigames are, I sincerely hope they don’t make an appearance in Mass Effect 3.

A generic wooden crate by any other name…

Maybe I didn’t go on enough side quests into the far flung reaches of the galaxy but some of the environments in Mass Effect 2 felt bland and repetitive. The game’s second act is based around establishing a loyal team by helping them deal with one of the larger skeletons in their various closets. Unfortunately this often means revisiting areas from earlier in the game and moving through the same environments.

The separate locations do feel different in a way that the first game’s identikit structures didn’t. However they still don’t escape the cover-based shooter’s inherent problem of needing environments to be filled with low walls and boxes. In mechanical terms, these elements of the environment make perfect sense. They give the player a constant rule-set and clearly differentiate what is and isn’t a piece of cover.  The problem is they make some environments feel samey and extremely linear.

A few other things worth mentioning:

• This game was reviewed on a PC with a 2.5ghz dual-core processor, 8800GT graphics card and 2gb of RAM. I encountered some very occasional framerate issues but no real technical problems.
• I played through as the ‘Vanguard’ class.
• Mass Effect 2 has most of the positive qualities of a top-flight third-person shooter. Unfortunately it also has the requisite disappointing final boss fight.
• I didn’t feel a great sense of closure after finishing the game, mainly due to the heavy emphasis on story continuity and in-game reminders of the inevitability of Mass Effect 3.

My complaints with Mass Effect 2 stem from a handful of very minor issues that I encountered throughout the game. Even if it was just a third-person shooter, Mass Effect 2 would still be a competent example of the genre. Add the profound sense of consequence to all of the player’s decisions and the brilliantly realised characters and Mass Effect 2 becomes much greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a testament to the game’s quality that as soon as I finished, I wanted to start a brand new character and play through again.

You should buy this game if…

…you want a third-person shooter with a story that matters and all the best qualities of an RPG.

Final Score

An almost seamless integration of third-person shooter mechanics with a top-notch story and wholly believable characters.

(What does this score mean?)