I played it with my girlfriend sat next to me, rapt with attention, watching the game as a movie and talking with me. That alone made it a much more pleasant experience than most singleplayer RPGs. Mass Effect 2 does have weaknesses, of course. The story is fundamentally the same thing Bioware (and others) have done before and the combat isn't as fast, punchy or complex as you'd find in a dedicated shooter, for example. For me (and many others, obviously) though, the strengths outweigh those faults - the world design has such a sense of personality to it, while the characters manage to be interesting and well written despite fitting into obvious roles and tropes (the flawed assassin, the shy engineer, etc). The performances too are sublime and the presentation is almost flawless - it does actually feel like playing a Hollywood blockbuster, at times. I actually think that makes for a great Deus Ex comparison, come to think of it. There too the combat isn't as good as it could have been (in fact, DE's gunplay is downright awful - a fact that nostalgia often makes us overlook) and the characters are blatant stereotypes (of course the lumbering German is an evil simpleton). Deus Ex's story is, like ME's, also a fairly familiar tale if you boil it down to basics - secret societies, yada yada. Deus Ex however, like Mass Effect 2, counters these with some brilliant strengths - in DE those strengths come in the level design, the intelligence of the script, the player agency and game balancing. At the same time though, it's different strokes for different folks. StarCraft 2, most would have you believe, has an 'epic and interesting story, is a really interesting and thoughtful experience overall'. Me, I thought it was rehashed, dull and painfully written bit of dross that didn't do anything but highlight how little the genre had move in the last decade and how easily players can be distracted from a lack of creativity by girls in skin tight clothes and a well known brand. M'eh.
Looks like quite a debate has kicked off! So i started ME2 properly tonight and... (spoiler alert!) Spoiler I thought how will they replace the Normandy? She was a beauty of a ship! And who would fly my new ship, it wouldnt be the same without the annoying brittle boned b*stard! And what did they do..... They brought them back!!!! The old tricksters! Epic!
Mass Effect 2 is still the only game ever to reach the same level of awesome as Max Payne 2 in my eyes. And thats praise indeed.
I started playing this last week for the time and although I am really enjoying it what is the developers fascination with lifts? The game should have been called, Mass Effect: Future Lift Journey Simulator!
I grabbed ME2 in the Steam sales this Christmas and started playing it last week. I didn't buy it before it dropped to that price simply because ME1 didn't grab my attention the way it should have. In terms of characters, feel, setting and story ME1 was great; but I thought the gameplay was just terrible. Unsatisfying, boring combat; limited character development options, repetitive out-of-combat gameplay.. The flaws were enough to put me off ever playing it a second time despite enjoying the actual RolePlaying elements of the game. ME2 suffers from many of the same flaws, but its combat is so much better (Biotics that don't take a whole minute to recharge and guns that don't feel like supersoakers, for instance) that it just feels like a much better game; despite the character development being simplified even further. My sleeping pattern got messed up over christmas due to insomnia and bad habits, to the point where I was going to bed at 7am and getting up at 3pm, so I skipped sleep on Friday night to force myself back into a normal sleeping pattern from the next night onwards; and I spent almost a solid 24 hours playing Mass Effect 2 while staying awake. That says something about its ability to engross. - My problems with ME2 though are that the actual main story is very thin on the ground. The majority of the game is taken up by the sidequests and loyalty missions, which is fine in this case because of their high quality and fun factor, but I just wish there were more 'main story' missions and that I didn't feel forced into a 'point of no return' situation every time I take a mission from the Spoiler illusive man . Another issue I have with it is that in a lot of regards the game feels like a copy/paste of Knights of the Old Republic, with a few changes here and there. Mass Effect 1 and Dragon Age had the same issue, but it really feels apparent in ME2 because of the setting. The RPG elements (in terms of leveling up etc) are much weaker and less engaging, but the story is better presented and more cinematic - It's a tradeoff, but not necessarily a clear-cut improvement on the standard BioWare formula that they've used since KotOR. Sometimes the things Shepard says don't really fit with the text-cue options available to the player, so I find myself abusing the quick-save key before talking to people simply because I don't trust my own character despite wanting to just get in and RolePlay the game instead of quickloading to get the response I want. That can be extremely frustrating at times. Lastly, it drives me crazy how the squad characters and other significant NPCs like Joker have great characterization and acting (albeit clichéd at times), while the quest NPCs are frequently carbon copies of the quest NPCs from other Bioware games. That's a bad thing mainly because the quest NPCs in Bioware games tend to behave and seem like bad Scooby Doo characters. Painfully obvious as to their motives and with some poor acting and characterization (bad guys with evil moustaches and gravel voices, vulnerable good guys with squeaky voices, etc). They just don't fit with the game's cinematic feel or the quality of the main characters and it's quite jarring when encountering them as part of the loyalty quests or missions. I haven't finished it yet, but with 60+ hours played according to Steam and no sign of me getting bored of it yet, I can at least say it's a damn good game. As for whether it compares to Deus Ex? I don't think it comes close. The fact that it just expands directly on the KotOR formula while improving the cinematic quality and shedding many of the RPG elements means that while I'm enjoying it now and will play it again, it simply won't stick with me the way that Deus Ex or even KotOR did. I'm looking forward to Mass Effect 3 already despite having not finished ME2 yet, but ME3 is going to have to be something really special for it to stick with me as a true classic series and not just a high-quality rehash of the KotOR formula with an original setting. ==== EDIT: Just to add: The DLC content should've been included in the main game. If I hadn't paid for ME2 at the steam christmas sale price I'd feel completely ripped off by EA and as though I were being treated like a moron. There's no justification for charging the guts of €15 (price of the 3 not-pointless DLC options) for some new characters and quests in a game like ME2 that had such a high initial retail price. Total ripoff
After playing ME1, I wasn't sure about ME2 in case it was just the same thing over again. However I am now tempted to get it. A quick question for you guys; I know this is a Steam thread, but I will be buying this on the console (already playing a lot of games on Steam!) and perhaps you can help clarify something. Is there any advantage to buying this for the PS3 (around 40 quid as it's out in a couple of days) against buying it on the 360 (around a tenner used)? The PS3 blurb says that it has 'hours of extra content' - is this all the DLC included or is it extra to the content available as DLC or, is it both? Thanks in advance!
Yep - when they launched ME1 they hailed it as a game 'with no loading screens' - a bit of a dodgy statement if yopu ask me considering the whole lift thing! At least the lifts didn't play 'Greensleves' !!
Whilst i agree with the RPG aspects of your post, i completely disagree with the combat. TBH i assume that since you said you never bothered playing it a second time, you didn't level particularly high? At the start of the game, yes, weapons and biotics are completely woeful. You get issued with a crappy peashooter that barely scratches the enemies and you have a very limited range of biotics/tech powers/abilities at your disposal and none of them feel like they're doing much. However after playing it through a couple more times, i began to appreciate the amount of "power" that came with being a higher level. I won't forget the time that i went to go lift a single person in one of the planetary building things, and as he was in the air and i went to shoot him i suddenly realised that i'd lifted the entire room and there were about 10 people floating mid air along with various crates. Likewise, the pistols, assault rifles, shotguns and sniper rifles all had terrible accuracy and recoil when i started, but after levelling them more i noticed later on that i could one shot some of the lower grunts with my shotgun, likewise after a short burst with the pistol. I feel that ME2 really lost this sense of progression by making your character inherently good with weapons. TBH i hardly notice that much of a difference each time i get one of the upgrade parts in ME2. Also, whilst the Cooldowns in Mass Effect 1 were too long in the early stages, i felt that at some points they were balanced due to the completely destructive nature of them (for example, Lift could be maxed out to have a radius of 10m, pretty much the size of the majority of indoor rooms encountered, and Barrier could be maxed out at 1250, bearing in mind the best armor in the game only provided 450 - although the highest shield amount if 540). Also after maxing out the "Adept" class skill and the specialisations, they decrease to somewhat acceptable times. IMO Mass Effect 2 completely overnerfed Biotics making them much less fun to play. Seeing someone get pinged from combining Lift + Throw was satisfying, but the AoE effect of Lift was massively reduced to 3m which i found fairly useless. Not to mention the global cooldown of abilities made everything feel less spammable imo. Basically what i think i'm saying is that when high level, ME1 did a great job of making you feel like you were stupidly powerful, but not whilst necessarily making the game feel easy. Mass Effect 2 completely gets rid of this feeling IMO which is why didn't like the gameplay as much. IIRC, the PS3 version of the game runs on an engine similar (if not the same) to the one Bioware will be using for Mass Effect 3. Supposedly it looks slightly better, but it already looks good on the 360 so i don't think there'll be too much to gain. As for the DLC question, i believe it comes with the previous "story" DLC stuff, like the Kasumi one, Rogue AI/VI one and the Shadowbroker/Liara one (sorry for not remembering their proper names lol). I guess a "downside" to the PS3 version is that you won't be able to port your "experience" from ME1... it's one thing to read and make decisions based on an interactive comic, it's another to have "been there" and "lived through" those moments.
I disagree completely, so I think we just have different tastes when it comes to game balance. I never rush through any game, so I'm quite sure I leveled my adept character quite high in ME1, but regardless I don't think it's much fun to be firing peashooters and waiting 30, 40, 50, 60s for a 'spell' to recharge - And I don't think it's much fun for that situation to improve to a point of mindless ease later in the game after subjecting the player to drudgery for the first three quarters. To me the gun combat in ME1 was terrible and the biotics served just to break it up slightly and make it lss of a chore, but they only did so every half a minute (at best, every minute at worst). The changes to the guns and the shorter biotic cooldowns are what saved ME2's combat from being drudgery to me. The long cooldowns gradually becoming more balanced just because the effect itself becomes overpowered is just bad game design as far as I'm concerned because it turns into a stop-start waiting game rather than something exciting and active. Getting to use spells with an appreciable effect every 3-20s is far, far more fun and exciting to me than getting to use an I.W.I.N button every minute that disables half the enemies on the screen. ME2 definitely lost something by simplifying weapons and stats, but it gained something more by making the combat more active and tactical rather than just popping out to shoot for a couple of seconds before your gun overheats while waiting for painfully-slow biotics to recharge. It's a matter of game desgn taste, clearly; but ME2 wins for me hands-down.
vdbswong - thanks for your response. As it was a long, long time ago that I completed ME1 - is there any advantage of taking your character through to ME2. Do you start off at a high level and gain an advantage because of that, or does the AI compensate relatively to your starting level (be it level 1 or level 40)?
