Mass Effect 2: Different but better? February 9, 2010 at 4:08 am
As a big fan of Mass Effect 1, I was looking forward (but also dreading) the sequel. Would they do it justice, would it ruin the storyline etc.? Well, I just finished playing it and I’ve got a sort of wishy-washy verdict on the game. They sort of changed a lot of things, made a lot of things a lot better and then also made a lot of things worse and introduced new issues and problems.
The most annoying thing to me has to be that the PC version is basically unfinished. No double-clicking (except in space travel for some reason), no scroll-wheel support for any of the windows, shitty mouse support in general, no ability to turn v-sync on or off (I want it on, but still), no anti-aliasing without a stupid hack (renaming the binary to UT3.exe if you have ATI Radeon, how ghetto is that), and I’m probably forgetting a good few things. I was able to correct some of these things by hacking into the .ini files and turning off stuff like mouse smoothing (and it even allows you to set mouse speed properly for each game element, making scanning much less of a pain), but it’s an indication of how little Bioware thinks of the PC gamers. I suppose we should be thankful they release the game for the PC at all, but I sort of expect more from them.
On the other hand, they made the actual gameplay fun, unlike the first game where the gameplay was either boring or frustrating, and incredibly easy. Your teammate AI is still pretty bad, but they’re not quite as useless as in the previous game. The game now plays like a proper third person action shooter type game, with everything you’d expect from such a game (headshots, cover, melee, etc.). They greatly reduced the complexity of the RPG elements, but to be honest, they were kind of broken in the first game so I didn’t miss them much. To compensate, the characters are now much more different from each other.
Of course, the real reason to play the game is for the story, and on that front they really delivered. I really liked the changes they made to the world, and the fact that the game was very different from the first one, but still captured the universe in a good way. I especially like what they did with the Asari (I won’t go into it more than that for spoiler reasons), but overall the universe is much better this time around, less “generic scifi-verse”. Also, the game is a lot funnier than the last installment (and the last one had its funny moments as well), with a lot of great little details thrown throughout the game.
So what are the flaws? Well, the action-based gameplay is still a bit rough around the edges–it’s pretty clear to me that this team is not used to making this kind of game. They did a great job, but sometimes the response time of the units is just not there. Especially when you’re trying to jump over an obstacle or get into cover, occasionally the game just doesn’t do it right. Furthermore, while they replaced some of the more boring elements in the game (such as the driving on planets, which I personally enjoyed but I hear a lot of people hated it), the scanning “game” they replaced it with is just too boring. Also, it seems like there aren’t that many secondary missions in this game, making it feel less epic than the first game, where I was almost overwhelmed by the amount of sidequests and little things you could do.
Overall, I loved the game, despite its flaws. I heartily recommend it if you’re into sci-fi at all. But, play Mass Effect 1 first!
