A detailed review of my favorite game.
Now for the review portion:
The graphics are easily technically proficient. The characters have depth, visible emotions, even personal mannerisms. The characters are developed and behave as you would expect from a game entirely focused on story like Heavy Rain. Combat is fluid, the interface is completely accessible. You can hotkey your own abilities or even the abilities of your group members. There is an actual "world map" style traveling interface, for those of you with the nostalgia bug.
The gameplay is nearly perfect. You move from cover to cover operating as a super soldier unit, plowing through enemy lines. Unlike the first game you stick to cover so you can rely "I'm in cover, they aren't going to shoot me full of holes", whereas the first game cover was rather hit or miss, and why bother since I can pop Immunity or Barrier and ignore damage anyway. These kinds of survival abilities are gone, and you have to actually fight like a soldier now. The use of shields and barriers makes traveling through cover exciting, seeing your shield pop up to absorb incoming gunfire. You have a total of 6 weapons reduced depending on your class and all of these weapons bring something to the table: Pistols, Shotguns, Sniper Rifles, Assault Rifles, Submachine Guns, and Heavy Weapons. Which class you pick determines which weapons you can use.
The classes are incredibly balanced, and they don't feel arbitrary like they did in the first game. The class you pick needs to play like the class you picked to survive. Vanguards for example are totally ineffective at range. Their biotics like pull and shockwave are it their best when they are blowing enemies out of cover, following it up with a close range shotgun blast. Their Biotic charge, which is a teleport explosion of rapacious awesomeness complete with barrier recharge plus increase AND a time dilation says it all. Infiltrators can turn invisible to line up the perfect headshot and get an automatic time slow whenever looking down the scope of a sniper rifle. Soldiers can slow down time, reduce damage and increase their damage output. Every class brings something of its own to the table.
The story is amazing. I played this before I played Mass Effect 1 and have since played both extensively. I found Mass Effect 1 to be very well written, but a little dry. Most of the characters in Mass Effect 1 were easily forgettable except Wrex and Liara. Garrus was annoying, just a beat cop that had no place on my ship. Mass Effect 2 comes back with some of the most memorable characters in fiction. Garrus returns not as a frustrated beat cop, but a betrayed mercenary commando. Tali actually gets some good dialogue and has some weight to her importance as a character. Mordin is hilarious, an instant classic. I can honestly say only Jacob and Zaeed were uninteresting characters this time around, which isn't bad out of 12 characters. You really feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders. The missions, even the side missions are more than just going into the same room, clearing out 1 group of enemies, and get a message and some XP for it. You have to plow through dozens of furious mercenaries, pirates, geth, and all manner of villainy the universe throws at you.
The game isn't without its flaws however. There are several clipping issues, where you can go through an invisible wall and get trapped inside of it, requiring a game restart. This is especially troubling because you have cling to these invisible walls for cover in nearly every battle. On very rare occasions I've had complete game freezes (maybe 5 freezes over a year of playing). Some cutscenes on the PC such as the Garrus loyalty mission sees significant graphical tearing, to the point that it is intrusive to the scene. That's pretty much it for technical issues.
For gameplay issues there is severe imbalance in companions. Most people won't see it until their first Insanity playthrough, but the companion AI needs some work. Miranda seems to be the worst, she won't find cover when 5 people are shooting at her, which leads to a lot of wasted medi-gel. After you make Grunt a Pureblood Krogan and if you buy the DLC Kasumi: Stolen Memory there's absolutely no reason to use any companions other than Kasumi and Grunt. Kasumi's shadowstrike is overpowered to the point of being broken, on some missions since I have my companion powers to only work on my command, she actually kills more people than I do with her Rapid Shadow Strike skill. Grunt, even on insanity, is totally invincible due to his Krogan regeneration. Some of the other companions have some useful skills, but their low survival rates and truly terrible combat AI make them inconsequential to the point of being useless when compared to the invincible Grunt and the overpowered Kasumi. Using any companion other than these 2 is purely aesthetic and not advantageous in any way.
Legion is also acquired far to late in the game. He's such an amazingly cool character to the franchise, but you can't even do character building with him because you're forced into the suicide mission immediately after receiving him and waiting to do character building comes at the cost of your ending.
The classes could use some balancing too. I don't think any class in ME3 should be reduced in effectiveness, rather that the Engineer and Adept should be brought UP to the level of the other classes. Engineers and Adepts will find themselves at huge disadvantages at higher difficulties because the increase in enemies with Shields, Barriers and Armor makes most of their abilities completely useless. Some abilities like Warp, Incinerate or Overload work well on some parts of these defenses but they pale horrendously in comparison to an Adrenaline Rush with an automatic weapon, a Biotic charge with time dilation, or an Assassination Cloak headshot.
The custom ammos need to be readjusted as well. Nothing compares to warp ammo. I might recommend switching ammos back to the old system, because spending 10 out of 51 talent points on 3 ammo types is a tough sell especially when Warp Ammo does 3 of the 4 defenses with a whopping +50% weapon damage increased to +100% to enemies effected by biotic effects. Incendiary ammo is cool, but not as effective as Warp. Shredder ammo is useless, especially on higher difficulties. Armor Piercing ammo is probably the only other useful ammo. Disruptor ammo is somewhat useful since its the only ammo that can reliably take down shields, but investing 10 points for something that is only good at one thing that could easily be taken care of with an automatic weapon or an Overload is a tough sell as well. Cryo-ammo is awesomely cool, but unusable on any target with protections.
All of these complaints however are extremely minor when compared to the incredible gameplay that makes up Mass Effect 2. Even on the higher difficulties, every class offers a new, immersive gameplay to the player. I'm looking forward to Mass Effect 3 and hope they can improve on the game as much as they did going from Mass Effect 1 to Mass Effect 2.