Mass Effect 2 Review (Xbox 360)

By Hector Cortez Feb 19, 2010, 9:41 GMT

The second installment in the Mass Effect series is a good game. It\'s a great game. It\'s Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner rolled into one, the kind you keep ingesting even when you\'re full.

Review written by Ivone Alexandre.

Imagine the best meal you've ever had, and then the beautiful garnish a chef might add just for the extra look and flourish that will send the experience over the top. Imagine enjoying the meal so thoroughly, you trick yourself into trying the yellowish parsley on the edge of the plate. Imagine the disappointment.

The second installment in the Mass Effect series is a good game. It's a great game. It's Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner rolled into one, the kind you keep ingesting even when you're full. But there's plenty of parsley to go around, the kind that gets stuck in your teeth and makes you want to return to the previous hours spent saving the world, hoping that loyalties won't fail, actually hoping the decisions you make in a virtual world will affect your survival.  

The storytelling is impeccable. You can either import a character from Mass Effect 1 or start a new character fresh. Either one lends you along a similar path: humans are on the council doing nothing, or non-humans are on the council failing to do anything. You meet previous love interests and a few Krogans may treat you differently based on some choices involving Wrex. The influence of previous decisions on the game is there, like a ketchup stain that's been through the wash every week since the end of Mass Effect 1, but it isn't anything to keep you stuck to the glass of your television about. This isn't a choose-your-own-adventure boys and girls. There's no need to keep your finger stuck in the previous page to ensure you can go back and prevent certain death.

The promise of decisions affecting the future is a hefty one, one for which we should all be proud of Bioware. They've taken on something that seems improbable, the ability to integrate us thoroughly into three epic games, to make us care about choices we make, and worry that they may drastically affect the outcome. The result, so far, with Mass Effect 2 shows promise, and with the possible outcomes (and the possibility of death), it only seems that Mass Effect 3 may be bring home the bacon. You have to run before you can fly, however. This second installment remains embryonic. Even simple. The truth is, the game tells you every step of the way the exact way to survive. The simplicity of what must be done in order to have a solid crew is so straight forward, I went through the final “suicide” mission never once fearing that a member of my crew might perish. In fact, I had to play it a second time and forfeit doing the extra obvious work to get people killed. Don't get me wrong, seeing myself truly die at the end of the game was exhilarating. But it has a ways to go before I start looking around every corner wondering if it will be my end.  

The game is linear, like silverware being arranged on a table so you know which utensil to use first. Every action sequence, interaction, and conversation has been meticulously executed and they're damn near perfect. For all intent and purpose, it becomes an interactive movie, whereby the revelations and eloquently shot cut scenes are as engaging and alive as the gameplay. I commend the paragon/renegade action options being added to the cut scenes as well. It's a positive move in the direction of reminding players that they aren't watching a movie, a la MGS 4, while still maintaining the intensity of the storytelling.    

Saying the game is linear, however, brings to light Bioware's insistence on the open galaxy approach, essentially leaving any planet or world at your fingertips. Remember that discolored parsley I was telling you about? Instead of dropping you in a vehicle on the planetary surfaces, you now scope out planets from afar and drop probes to gather resources. I appreciate the time and effort Bioware has gone through to make this world authentic but please raise your hand if you read every single planetary dossier in the first game. I promise you won't in the second. The fact of the matter remains that Bioware does such a great job at the main elements of narrative and dialogue that these extra “garnishes” that pose as an open world are calorie-less. The elimination of the vehicles makes it feel even less “open” and the extra missions you can find by exploring these planets are a joke and hold no significance to your final mission, a mission that the game never lets you forget you're building up for. Which is ok. I want to play that mission over and over and over again. I don't want to have a bunch of dialogue-less, meaningless, non-linear interactions on random planets. Either beef up the side missions and make them what we know and love about the Mass Effect universe, or integrate them into the storyline, otherwise, cut the parsley. They're not fooling anyone into thinking that what makes Mass Effect great is the fact that you can go anywhere and do anything. It's great because you can make decisions and moral choices about very specific things and travel along a very straight line that is both authentic and engaging.  

This straight line will require combat, which the game delivers. Employing biotics, tech, or bullets are all equally enjoyable and provide clean, varied attack combinations. You'll find the particular ones that work and probably use those exclusively but the streamlined combat and weapon upgrade system means you're not sifting through a ton of different guns and armor wondering whether or not you're on the sixth or seventh installment of a particular shotgun. While the combat mechanics work impeccably, you won't get a chance to vary your strategy enough because the battles go a lot like this:

1. Turn a corner.
2. Enter a somewhat narrow corridor.
3. Run into waist-high walls.
4. Anticipate attack.
5. Duck.
6. Repeat.

I mean, come on, some of the new aliens you fight travel by floating platforms that even form narrow pathways as they land next to you. It's a lot of the same tune being played by slightly different instruments. The few times they put you in an “arena” type setting, enemies only come at you from one very obvious direction. The predictability of the combat renders the game incredibly easy, which I wouldn't normally hold against it (a game's ease doesn't have to detract from great story or gameplay) but when you're putting me in peril and marketing the weight and danger of the mission before us, please give some resistance.  

I found myself enduring repetition to get to the next cut scene, which is mastery on Bioware's ability to engage in a story. Like I've said, the game is one hell of a main course. With everything on its plate, however, its hard to make every element of it equally epic. While the loyalty missions for the characters are well-written, they're just as repetitive and predictable as the normal combat. A few took me by surprise, and not so ironically, they were the non-combat based missions, of which there are few. I'm not saying to take the combat out; they have a system that makes the rpg elements of the game shine and the repetitive combat tolerable, but there's no strategy in using the abilities. All the battlefields are the same, all the bad guys are the same, etc. If you want me to be as engaged in combat and missions as I am in storyline, use some variation and, for the love of all that is loaded, stop only sending me enemies from a hundred meters in front of me. Surprise me.  

Play the game. Dig your fingernails into the story and characters and don't let go. It's what keeps the game alive. Be proud of Bioware. Don't worry about bringing napkins to the table because you'll lick your fingers clean. Just take a moment of silence to bow your heads and ask Bioware to trust what it's doing with story and stop trying to do everything else. Push the envelope with our choices and vary the missions. We promise, it will only leave us hungry for more.