Mass Effect 2 Mega Review

Author:  Glen Turner

Deep in the trackless wastes of Edmonton, Alberta lies a little software company called Bioware.  What does this company do?  It makes CRPGs (computer roleplaying games) ? and in this reviewer?s humble opinion, it makes them better than anybody else.

Bioware?s latest product, Mass Effect 2) is the sequel to a highly-successful CRPG called Mass Effect.  In producing this sequel, Bioware took some risks they didn?t have to take in making the sequel to such a successful game.  Those risks included a passel of changes to the core gameplay of the original game.  This has led to plenty of drama on the Bioware forums from histrionic Mass Effect fans.

Did the risks pan out?  Well, not all of them, no ? but enough that the sequel already has the inside track to being the 2010 game of the year.  I believe this game may well be Bioware?s masterpiece?or even the best CRPG (computer role-playing game) that has yet been made.  In Bioware?s finest tradition, Mass Effect 2 breaks new CRPG ground, but also does a lot of traditional CRPG things really well.

Read on, and I?ll tell you about some of what works and some of what doesn?t in the PC version of Mass Effect 2.

Introduction

The Collectors stop by for a few more human subjects.  Volunteers?

The game is set in ?the Mass Effect universe,? where humans have learned to travel the stars, have indeed traveled said stars, and along the route ran into a variety of humanoid and other sentient aliens.  Several powerful sentient races have joined together into an ?Alliance? run by ?the Council,? which splits its time between promoting colonization and economic development on the one hand, while with the other hand fending off various threats to the Alliance from the usual suspects: criminal masterminds, hideous ravening monsters, and mysterious alien forces bent on the destruction of all organic life.

Taking care of such nuisances is all in a day?s work for the player.  You?re Shepard - a 007-ish Council ?Specter? with a license to kill in a variety of fun ways.  As the only human Specter, you played an instrumental role in the original game, leading the Council to seat its first human representative.  In fact, depending on your actions in the original ? of which more below ? the Council may even have become human-dominated by the beginning of Mass Effect 2.

While masterminds and monsters pop up here and there, most of your time will be spent on the to-do list item that reads ?prevent destruction of all life-forms throughout the Milky Way.?  Even better, you get to do it in the company of some of the most memorably-crafted characters and in some of the slickest cutscenes and dialogue-laced gameplay that has ever graced a computer monitor, all while you level up, grab new skills, and rake in the loot.

Enjoy some cool science fiction.

Technical Issues and Installation

Download and installation from Direct2Drive of the 9.62 GB game file went smoothly.  The manual is downloaded separately.

The game runs quite well on Vista 64 on my 3.0 GHz dual core Intel processor with a 8800 GTX 768 MB video card.  In fact it?s still peppy in the morning if I leave it running in the background overnight, which is a no-no for most games.  However, some PC gamers with dual cores will experience overly load long times of two minutes or so, which is problematic because the maps are broken up into relatively small areas necessitating a fair number of loading screens.

I found a fix on the Bioware forums that works fine for me:  (1) Start up Mass Effect 2; (2) Alt-tab to the desktop; (3) Start Task Manager; (4) Under processes, right-click on ?masseffect2.exe? and click on ?Set Affinities;? (5) Uncheck one of the CPUs and hit ?OK;? (6) Re-check the CPU you just unchecked and hit ?OK? again; and (7) Play the game. 

If this works for you, you will need to do this every time you play the game, but it?s very much worth it.  For me, the load times were cut by about 2/3.

Otherwise, I haven?t had any major technical issues, and in fact I have not seen many reports of show-stopping bugs in cruising the game forums.  I did get stuck on the terrain a couple of times, but I always had a hot backup so it was no big deal.  Bioware has a good reputation for pre-release bug-stomping and this game shipped with few bugs, even though its development cycle was not as long as the company?s other recent games.

I?m not very tech-y, so you might want to google around to learn more on this subject.  All I can tell you for sure is that the game runs just peachy for me.

Graphics and Sound

A typical Wargamer review will contain separate sections on graphics and sound.  I?m lumping them together because I?m not really the guy to tell you a whole bunch about either one.

Start with cel shading, textures, and that other fancy graphics stuff about which I know nothing.  I just plays the games.  But I can tell you this: we are talking about one great-looking game, one of the best-looking games I have played.  At this point I will highly commend you to any of the Mass Effect 2 discussions in Wargamer.com?s unparalleled General Computer Gaming forums, where  the resident experts can tell you just how good these graphics are, at least if you butter ?em up first.

The art style is realistic?well, realistic if you can accept zooming around the stars and fighting giant roosters in space suits as real.  (You can?t?  ???)  The use of motion-capture on facial expressions is as good as I?ve seen, speaking of which, the human characters are all pretty hot if you?re into that sort of thing.

Huh?  Did you say something?

As for sound?  Mass Effect 2 is one of the very few games I play that I do not accompany with music from my own playlists.  Playing this game is frequently like watching a movie.  I don?t listen to other music while I?m watching a movie and I don?t do it while I?m playing Mass Effect 2.

Getting Started

Don?t expect a wealth of information from the manual, which is contained on 17 small PDF pages, three of which are devoted to credits and other filler.  But at least you can learn the main controls.

Character Creation

A major element of the pre-release publicity was the ability to import a character from Mass Effect.  Having played through the game both with and without a carry-over character from Mass Effect, I?m in a good position to tell you something about this.

First of all, if you haven?t played Mass Effect and want to jump straight into Mass Effect 2, have no fear, the game works just fine.  That?s what I did in my first playthrough, and I had a ripping good time with the game.

Note, however, that I had already played the original, and in fact I had played it several times.  So the one thing I can?t tell you is how easy it is to sink into the ?Mass Effect universe? through Mass Effect 2 alone if you didn?t already know what it was about.  In terms of sheer gameplay, though, the differences between playing with a Mass Effect save and starting fresh are relatively minor, and once you?ve played through Mass Effect 2 once and can start with the bonuses you get for having completed a playthrough, the differences become even more minor.

Despite all that, I heartily recommend playing the games in sequence.  To start with, the original Mass Effect is a great game in its own right ? if not, in this reviewer?s opinion, quite as good as the sequel ? and deserves to be played for its own sake.  Additionally, while the starting resource bonuses you get in Mass Effect 2 from having completed the first game are not even slightly necessary to successful play, they allow you to spend less time at the tedious scanning mini-game, which I will describe below.

Most importantly, this game is, like all Bioware games, heavily story-centered.  And the story-telling is very good.  With Mass Effect 3 on the distant horizon, with a tentative release date for the end of 2011, you really want to experience the entire three-game story arc of what shapes up to be one of the classic computer game series ever made. 

Really.  Do it.  Not only you get to experience the entire story, but several Mass Effect 2 encounters play out differently depending on whether you have played the first game, and if so, what choices you made then.

At any rate, whether you ignore me and start afresh or get smart and go with a saved character from the original game, you start this game with the character creation screens.  Even with a saved-game character, you are allowed to start from scratch not only on skills but also on your character?s appearance, which you can customize as much or as little as you like with a number of appearance sliders; alternatively, you can leave your character just like he or she was at the end of Mass Effect ? except for your levels and items, that is, which are gone with the wind that swept across space. 

The default Shepard

I was able to use the character creator to make a male human that looks kind of like me, which I suppose means hideously ugly.  (By the way, there is an in-game explanation for why you?re able to change your character?s appearance even if he or she is carried over from the original.)

You also choose your character class at this time.  There are six character classes based on combinations of the three core competencies in the game: combat, tech, and ?biotics? (which is a form of science magic that allows the biotic-user to project various force fields about the battlefield, to good and often entertaining effect).  The classes are: (1) Soldier (combat); (2) Engineer (tech); (3) Adept (biotics); (4) Vanguard (combat/biotics); (5) Sentinel (tech/biotics); and (6) Infiltrator (combat/tech).

Each class gets a small number of special skills to which you may allocate points when leveling up.  One skill for each character type is a class-based specialist skill that generally makes you bigger and badder, increasing both your health and your attack abilities.  It seems to me that, no matter what class you take, you will want to level up that specialist skill all the way, and soon.

Generally, it?s better to max out a small number of chosen skills instead of sprinkling your points out among all the skills.  That?s because the skill timer in combat is universal.  Since you can?t spam skills one after another, and must instead wait on the timer to run before you can use another skill, it?s usually better to have a single very powerful skill than two somewhat powerful skills.

I have played as a soldier and a vanguard.  The soldier is the default, and if you don?t make a choice you wind up as a soldier, not a bad idea since it is a lot of fun, probably the easiest class, and the one I would recommend for someone new to the system.  Soldiers get to use pistols, shotguns, assault rifles, sniper rifles, and heavy weapons, missing out only on submachine guns among the available weapons.  In addition to the specialist skill, soldiers get the highly-useful ?Adrenaline Rush? skill, which works just like good old ?bullet time? in Max Payne (i.e., it slows down time for you, but not your enemies, for a few seconds).

Vanguards only get access to pistols, submachine guns, shotguns, and heavy weapons, but can add assault rifle competency midway through the game.  Vanguards get to use the nifty biotics skills, too, though, which are a lot of fun but require some play skill to use effectively, since, as explained below, they can only be used against enemies whose defenses have already been stripped by gunpower or skill use.  Vanguards also get the ?Charge? skill, which allows you to zoom up to an enemy and butt him really hard, knocking him back or down.  Charge is a blast to use?skillfully.  Using Charge at the wrong time, however, is one of the best and easiest ways to get yourself killed.

I can?t tell you so much about the other classes, but I will add that the Infiltrator class has a combat style all of its own, as the Infiltrator can assume a Tactical Cloak even mid-combat that allows him or her to move about the battlefield undetected.  Sounds like a get out of trouble free card, if nothing else.

I also can?t tell you much about the tech skills, since I haven?t played a character that uses them.  However, from using tech NPC squad members a few times, they appear to be significantly toned down from the first game, as have been the biotics skills.

In the next installment of this Mega Review we'll take a look at the tutorial, interface, and core gameplay.