Many things to eplore but not enough, more like a folow-up then envolved story.
Runup
When I played the first MS in the series (there will be a MSE 3) they catched me totally with great vissual, great story and the great variation and giving the player a chanse to take their own route in the story, the folowup is just as good in thoose things but alot of the exsitement are lost if we look at how exsitement the first was.
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Story
The universe as humankind know of are threatned, a mysterious race called collectors are "collecting" humans from distant collonies and the Alliance do not want to have anything to do with it and shut their eyes for what is upcoming.
Captain Shepard are brough back from the dead by an guerilla group named Cerberus witch show intrest in human advancement, Cerberus are known for their "unorthodox" way to take things in matter.
The leader of Cerberus, "Illustrative Man" had an agenda to wake the warhero Shepard from the dead, he wants to stop the collectors as they threat humankinds leading position in the world.
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Above are the basic strategy of the game, but how does it play out?
You play as Shepard just like before and most old allies from the previous game is there even the Normandy (Shepards ship) is there, so there is a void to fill because even tho the world migth act large it really isn't, the few Citys in the game don't let you stroll around as much as before and the giant "Citiadel" takes 2min to run around because you are only visiting a very, very, very tiny part of the multi million/ perhaps even billion City.
Cerberus wants you to assamble a group of the best figthers in the world to find out all you can about the "Collectors" and you do small tasks to gain your crews trust before they folow you.
I did all of the sidequests related to anything i could find and still I didn't find this game as large as i wanted to, there are a few missions and things to DL (buy) to make the game a tad larger but the game is finished and there are nothing left to explore witch the small DL wouldn't change so much.
Getting a solid 25-30h of a game by todays standard is perhaps good or even great since many games do not last 10h of playing, but a really fun and brilliant game as MSE 2 is the world should be a bit larger, but this partly because the story is somewhat not there, only a few of the missions you do are really related to the Collectors in the game witch is a letdown, you'll find yourself mostly looking for new party-members or helping them to gain their loyality/trust.
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Gameplay
The hud in this game is great and routing/controlling your partymembers in this game is just as easy as I imagine any game could do. Simple Use your left shift ^ and you can controll all diffrent spells/abilleties.
The XP system is not flawless but near, you mostly gain levels for compleating quest and just not killing enemies so you wont reach Lv60 just strolling any dark ally and killing helpless babies. (as many other roleplay games do.)
Every level you reach get you points to add to your spells/abbileties, and it's very easy to see as there are no use of the usual roleplay spell-tree-ladder, instead you have full visiallity over what all diffrent things do and to get a new option you know exsactly where to spend your pts.
The fixed camera serves this game great and you'll have visual over you whole group.
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Are there any bugs in this game? -Yes there is!
An odd and bad bug in the game has to do with just the whole party/group, under some missions a single friend get lost and couldn't find their way back to you, this is really anoying since you'll have to use the whole team to do that great. (you'll get shoot down if not.) this happened many times, and while you give your partymember instructions to move they do not move, in a few rare occations I even had a flying member because (Samara) she climbed ontop of where i stood and she couldn't move, this didn't fix until i did restart the game.
In a occation I somehow flyed also, and where there was ground i couldn't stand so i just flyed in the air, this is a bug that shouldn't have passed out in the release, also a restart was needed and the game didn't save correctly. (restarted the mission also.)
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Vissual and sound?
Just like MSE 1 this is brilliant, the game is amacing on theese points, the vissual is great the voiceactors do a great job getting theese caracters come to life, music and sound effects are great they fit rigth where they should and the quality is great.
Even tho this game look great it really isn't that demanding in today standards, even a ligth gamePC could do some AA to the maximum/Veryhigh settings.
The game runs fluid, steady FPS, sure this may have to do with my PC but according to other with lesser PC's they say the same.
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Summary
Even there are many things to wish upon this title, i can't find a reason not to play it.
The game is great in many aspects, and taking control of Captain Shepard is somewhat trilling, im sure that whatever genre you like you'll love Mass Effect 2.