Feb 16 2010
My thoughts on Mass Effect 2
Considering I’ve been playing the game for close to a fortnight, I thought I should put my thoughts down on the game.
Where to start… Okay so after I finished the first Mass Effect, I waited a day before starting the next one. Upon starting I could see straight away that there were indeed massive improvements to the graphics, which was nice. The game opened up with a scene of the Normandy being destroyed by some unidentified massive space craft that looked half like a rock, and Shepard being ’spaced’ and dying.
Great start! Then a group from Cerberus – yeah, remember that crazy black ops group? – picks you up and fixes you better than you were before! Yay! But then you’ve got to run around with a group of Cerberus people for pretty much the rest of the game, and deal with the irritating ‘Illusive Man’ – voiced by Martin Sheen, and seems to be an homage to ‘The Smoking Man’ of X-Files fame – to figure out why whole colonies of humans have gone missing.
You get only two of your previous crew members, Tali and Garrus, though Joker is still your pilot. You do, however, get a bunch of new people to run around with, many of whom are irritating in one way or another. Miranda is your link to Cerberus, and comes off as mean and frosty, though you can make her less so by completing her ‘loyalty mission’. Then there’s Jacob, who’s strangely brusque with you considering you’re his commanding officer. You get a very strong biotic named Jack who’s kind of insane – understandably so – but who is also very rude and foul mouthed. You get a Salarian doctor named Mordin, who’s actually pretty funny, and a Krogan named Grunt, who I like quite a bit, even if he’s violent as all heck. Samara is quite nice, an Asari Justicar, so at least she’s fighting the good fight. Thane is a Drell assassin, and in spite of his profession, is a stand up guy. Haven’t gotten to know Legion all that much yet, but it’s interesting having a Geth on board. Then there’s Zaeed, a human bounty hunter, who’s an irritating old ass, in my opinion.
You’re no longer with the Alliance, who’ve tried to say that all your warnings about the Reapers where silliness, and that really it was just the Geth and Saren that were the issue, and you’re on a bigger, better Normandy supplied by Cerberus.
Personally I am enjoying this game more, but the storyline is far, far less appealing than the previous game. I don’t really dig fighting on the side of Cerberus, especially with the Illusive Man being all creepy and ‘end justifying any means’ kind of thing. I personally think he’s some remnant from the Protheans, perhaps an AI or some such, but either way, I don’t like him and I don’t like working for him.
I’m also irritated by the new HUD, and think that it would actually be, oh, I don’t know, a good thing to be able to see your damn health and shields bars!
Yeah, mixed feelings on this one. I liked a heck of a lot about the first game, and I am enjoying the sequel a lot, but I am not as happy with the over-all game as I was with the first one.