Mass Effect 2

After playing, and quite liking, the first Mass Effect, I jumped on the chance to buy the 2nd and 3rd installments this Christmas. Mass Effect 2 takes place two years after the events of the first, and after your own rather spectacular death. Produced by Bioware and published by EA, this game first surfaced in 2010 following the big success of the first.

So we begin with the Normandy being attacked, Shepherd (the guy you control) putting the pilot (Joker) into the last escape pod before dying and floating into the orbit of a planet. You wake up two years later covered in scars, and are informed that an organisation called Cerberus have managed to stitch you back together. The base where you are recovering is however under attack and you must escape onto the new and improved Normandy. From there you learn of the Collector threat and, similar to the first, must collect a team of experts from across all races to eradicate this threat. I’m not going detail the storyline, but you get the idea.

Now my problem with this type of game, and I’ve talked about this before (in relation to Dragon Age in particular), is the idea that your decision-making has a great impact on the game. So with Mass Effect you have Paragon and Renegade options with every conversation and decision you make, with paragon being good and fair and renegade basically making you out to be a bit of a bastard. How renegade or paragon you are is meant to effect how people treat you and the final outcome of the game. This type of approach would be fine if the creators of the game actually wanted you to be evil and allowed you to play the game as evil.

I find renegade far more entertaining than being paragon, so I of course tried my hardest to be as cruel as possible, and I did ge to do some fantastic douchey things. Example: I punched a female reporter in the face, and kicked another guy out of a window. Good, this is (if I choose to be evil) exactly what I want to be able to do. But, and here comes the crux of the situation, if you do this when having quest conversations, you end up refusing to do most quests. If you change to be paragon during these conversations, you end up gaining paragon and losing renegade and so end up being neutral pretty much the entire game. So I wasn’t quite evil enough to tell my team to get over my decisions , but I also wasn’t paragon enough to apologise for them.

This led to two of my team not gaining loyalty, locking me out of some of their special abilities, and a lack of loyalty also has consequences at the end. I get that they want you to make the choices and the consequences be proportionate to the action, but it still seems as though you are pushed away from being evil, in any case in makes the game bloody difficult to finish. Sometimes I even thought I was I doing a renegade action and got paragon for it – explain that to me!

Oh, also, remember that facial scarring I mentioned earlier because of the reconstruction? Yeh, if you’re paragon they heal but if you’re renegade your face slowly gets worse and worse until you looked like a cracked lava bed. Check it out.

All in all the game is quite good, the character development and relationships you can potentially have are quite interesting and the fighting techniques haven’t strayed far from the ease of first game. Many of the people you meet are familiar faces from the first game, and you can import your character and ending from Mass Effect into Mass Effect 2 if you wish. This obviously has ramifications depending on who you decided to kill off in the first. If you don’t import a character, the game makes this decision for you.

So, if you haven’t had a go at the trilogy, pick up the first and see what you think. If you prefer shooters then this probably isn’t for you, but if you like a game such as Dragon Age because of the story telling/decision making aspect, then Mass Effect could be right up your street.

This is quite a short review, but that’s mainly because the game is a pretty standard one. It’ not amazing, but it’s entertaining enough to fill a few hours. I would recommend making multiple saves, because you could make a decision without realising what effect this will have further down the line.