An overall great game that fixes many of the vexing issues from the first game and then goes about creating new ones.
This is a good analogy for what Bioware has done with Mass Effect 2.
On the plus side, the baseline fundamentals are there and are rock solid. The visuals, the voice acting, the audio sound track and the magnificent sense of scale are breathtaking and not only equal, but far surpass the original title. Glitches and bugs are almost completely ironed out. From the very first few moments you start playing, you know you're about to enjoy a beautiful experience that builds on and amplifies what you had in the first game.
Make no mistake, Mass Effect 2 is one of the best games of the last couple of years and remains a "must buy" for anyone with a gaming pulse, but it has a few issues that keep it from being the flawless offering that we all hoped it would be. In its favor, if there was something from the first game that was frustrating or flawed, then something was done to address it in the second. It just isn't always a good something. To their credit, Bioware took in the feedback and criticisms from some of the warts in the first game and corrected them. The Mako is unwieldy and difficult to control? No problem. It's completely gone from the second game. There are some balance and combat issues with the character classes? Mass Effect 2 has you covered. The character classes are completely reworked and your available character customization options are about half of the first title to the point that a lot of the characters are kind of interchangeable. Sometimes the menus and inventory system can be a bit overwhelming? No sweat. The game has stripped down the available options for inventory with regards to weapons and armor to the point where taking the time to browse through your party's equipment is almost as non-existent of an experience as driving the Mako.
The result is a game that is a shooter title masquerading as a role playing game. Almost across the board, the rpg elements from the original are either stripped down or removed entirely.
This is a decision that will appeal to some while being a frustration to others. The benefits of these design decisions are immediately obvious. The action in the game is more consistent. Lulls are almost non-existent. The combat in the game is much improved and more exciting.
Unfortunately, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Many people buy rpg titles in part because they like experimenting with various character build combinations. They enjoy the thrill involved in finding a rare piece of armor in a shop or out in the field. They like the idea that different armor actually protects differently and that it actually matters that some characters can only wear light stuff and others can wear heavy duty suits. The Mako wasn't a bad concept from the first game. In fact, it was fun to mow down major Geth "tanks" at times with minimal effort. It was the controls of the Mako that were frustrating, not the idea of having an all-terrain tank to drive around.
In this and many other areas of the game, each improvement from the first title seems to have been balanced out with a step backward. For example, the original Mass Effect was criticized for large, empty planets that obligated players to drive the Mako around for long lengths of time to find the occasional resource to scan and gather. With Mass Effect 2, that sometimes frustrating experience is removed. Instead it is replaced by, astonishingly, an even more mind-numbingly dull way of gathering resources in the form of "scanning" planets from orbit. Initially this is mildly fun as a change of pace. However, even with a scanner speed upgrade that can be purchased this exercise becomes almost painfully boring after the first couple of times doing it.
Continuing a common theme, for a lot of players of the original Mass Effect it was annoying to be in a huge universe that, overall, felt extremely empty because there wasn't much in the way of populated worlds. Mass Effect 2 attempts to fix this by adding a great many more unique combat areas which is nice, but doesn't really address the root problem of not enough "town" type environments to visit.
As you recruit each of your companion characters in the game, you will eventually be presented with optional "loyalty" missions to build favor with the character. One character may ask you to go explore a particular place that she was raised in that has left significant emotional scarring. Another might ask you to go and protect her sister from being discovered and taken away by her father. Still another might ask you to help them get past puberty. (Seriously.) Unfortunately, this system usually means that the dialog trees for the many recruitable characters don't go as deep as you might like and once you've switched their status to "loyal" there's a built-in disincentive for a lot of people to keep talking with their companions: there's nothing material to gain
On the plus side, each of these requests takes you to a unique and different combat environment. Gone are the days when you felt like a glorified galactic exterminator and every mission seemed like it boiled down to "land on hostile planet X, track down bad guys Y, and then kill them."
This is good news! The downside is that often times, there still aren't a lot more "town" types of places to visit than there were in the last go around. The one that are there are quite well developed and each one feels very different from the others. Whether it is landing on the Kling…er Krogan home world and getting a feel for the conditions that make Krogans how they are or exploring the crime and poverty ridden slums of Omega, these areas add detail and feel to the game. There just aren't enough of them.
From a story perspective, this game is the middle game of a trilogy and it shows badly. My first thought when I beat the game was, "Wait, that's it?" The story does not get advanced nearly enough in this title from the last one. In fact, in many ways it is a bit of a letdown because it introduces and hints at a lot of different things to come in the future, but never really gets you anywhere in the present. There's a lot of foreshadowing, but not a lot concrete. It fleshes out the history of the Reapers and the Protheans, and seeing more details of what exactly happened to the Protheans is horrific and fills you with a real sense of wanting to play a little longer so you can get closer to preventing it from happening to the current galactic races, but there is definitely an unsatisfied feeling at the end.
Adding onto that problem is the issue that a lot of the reactions of the rest of the galaxy just don't make a lot of sense from a realism perspective when carried over from the first title. Nearly everyone you met even for the shortest of time periods who survived the meeting with you from the original game makes a new appearance, but in many cases their reactions to meeting with you again seem very odd.
Nowhere is this more obvious than from the reactions of the always irritating galactic council. You see these annoying idiots exactly one time early in the game, and then never interact with them again. Speaking from a personal standpoint, that's a big plus because their reaction to you being right about everything in the first game and even to saving their hindparts is to put their hands over their ears and ignore you yet again in the second game.
Saving or not saving the council really makes little difference. You still have no credibility and no support. This is just plain, flat-out not realistic. These people would have to be complete morons not to believe you by now. Another area is the reaction to your "romances" from the first game. Many of them will make repeat appearances, but their reaction to the love of their life returning after appearing to die two years earlier is, shall we say, underwhelming at best. Your dialog options to dig into this reaction are lackluster and this is very frustrating.
Still, at the end of the day this is a fantastic new game. While many will feel a bit of a letdown that so many of the RPG elements are stripped down and even eliminated entirely, what is left is still a game that will bring many hours of enjoyment and more than adequately sets the stage for what is hoped to be a thrilling conclusion.
True Score Ranking: 9.1