Mass Effect 2

Here's a few spoilers, yo.

There is a mission that jumps to mind when I think of Mass Effect 2. It is a side mission in which you are tasked with finding out why a giant spaceship crash-landed onto a backwater planet many years ago with no one around for possibly light-years. The catch is that the only way to recover this data is to go onto the ship. The ship that crashed and has been decaying for years. The ship that crashed and has been decaying for years on the edge of a cliff thousands of feet above the ground. As your version of Commander Shepard of the Normandy walks around on this ancient, decrepit ship, it starts to tilt. There is no music, only the creaking sound of precariously placed metal. Tiles and other piece of the ship break and fall to the ground. A staircase collapses while you are walking on it. If you move too far to the end of the ship, it’s going to collapse. Unfortunately, that is precisely where you need to go.

This is an expertly paced mission, an exercise in excruciation and terror which is indicative of the greatness of this game. Everything that was done well in Mass Effect is done better in its sequel. I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s calm down and look at this game critically, shall we? Breathing…breathing…ok.

To start, the story is just as big and breath-taking as the last one. The game starts off with Shepard dying and Cerberus, the shadow group bent on making humans the dominant species in the galaxy, spends tons of money to rebuild him. The Normandy was also destroyed in the attack, but never fear, she is rebuilt as well. The fate of the galaxy is still in Shepard’s hands as a new threat called the Collectors (though they are intimately tied to the Reapers) is attacking human colonies but leaving no trace. The dialogue is well-written; at the very least better than in the last game. Most video games suffer from stilted dialogue, and this game is no different. However, the characters are enjoyable enough and the voice acting done well enough that it’s easy to overlook. Also and possibly more importantly, Bioware decided to delve more deeply into the universe they created, focusing in on the lesser races from the first game, especially the Quarians. Few teammates are actually back for this game. If they are, they generally play small supporting roles. The exception to this (thankfully, as she’s my favorite) is Tali. Tali’s character has been rounded out substantially since the last game, due in no small part to the expansion of character-specific missions. To gain the loyalty of all of your crew members, you will have to take part in missions designed specifically to bring out their back story. It’s a useful tool within the gameplay to develop who these people are that have your back on this mission.

I mentioned that you will need to gain the loyalty of your crew, but what I mean was that you will need to gain the loyalty of your crew if you want them to live. Yes, everyone up to an including Shepard can and will die during the last mission if you are stingy with upgrading your ship or too lazy to go on loyalty-building missions with your crew. Once on the mission, it is also necessary to make decisions which could kill crew if done incorrectly. This adds a lot of weight to the mission, making it just as terrifying as standing on that rocking ship.

Again, Bioware knocked the game’s world design out of the park. This time around, both indoor and outdoor sets are beautifully constructed with variety abound. Gone are the days of drab corridors. Now, though the corridors remain, they’ve been given a bright shiny polishing and the inclusion of many nooks and crannies to explore. The Citadel was also revamped. After it was nearly destroyed in the first one, vast remodeling projects have been undertaken by the Council. Well, that’s assuming that you saved the Council in the last game. If you import a character from the first Mass Effect then the decisions you made will have repercussions in Mass Effect 2. One quibble I have with the game is how little of an effect that is, but I understand that you can’t have everything in life.

Many changes were made to the gameplay as well. For instance, gone are the days of the weapons cooldown. Now, we have the thermal clip. Acting just like ammo in a real gun, thermal clips absorb the heat created by the energy weapons of the game’s universe and ejects itself once it takes all of the heat it can get. The ammo is universal, so you can use any thermal clip in any gun. Though a seemingly minor change, it makes gunplay and gameplay much faster and fresher, setting a quick pace for the game. AI has been revamped as well, making all of the enemies just a little bit harder to kill than before. The RPG elements of the game have been streamlined, which can be good or bad depending on how much you like putting individual points into powers in a menu screen. They also included quicktime paragon-renegade actions. During a cutscene, a right trigger or left trigger will appear on the screen, allowing you to change the course of the scene towards something undoubtedly badass. For instance, you can punch a reporter like you’re a celebrity! Or you can push a guy out of a window and use your best one liner! The whole thing is somewhat of a gimmick, but it is a fun one that breaks up the litany of cutscenes and sometimes boring dialogue that comes with a game like this.

It must also be said that Bioware brings up interesting twists on certain concepts. For the most part, the game is a straightforward, if exceedingly well done, morality-based RPG-shooter hybrid. There aren’t necessarily a lot of surprises, such as the morally ambiguous corporation at the heart of the storyline. However, every once in a while there is a brilliant nugget of originality. For instance, on Illium, a NAFTA wet dream of a planet where nearly everything is legal to buy and sell, you are asked to help a slave find a master. Normally, this would be the bad choice in a game. Slavery is generally viewed as a bad thing by everyone who doesn’t wear a sheet on their head. On Illium, however, slavery is legal. It’s often used as a way to get rid of debts, like indentured servitude. In fact, it’s the only way that this slave, a Quarian, can get out of her current predicament. Slavery is, strangely enough, her way out. This is a welcome, if very uncomfortable, point of view. It’s not often you see a situation in which slavery is actually beneficial to the slave and, given our nation’s history, it creates a very weird predicament. Do we support slavery, which is abhorrent in our society and reality in general or do we stand against it when it would be so clearly beneficial to this individual in an imagined space. Outside of the narrative, too, there are interesting sequences such as one where you are forced to use a biotic to create a bubble which will keep out a swarm of bee-like insects. If you leave the bubble, bad things happen. This reduction of space is very well done and creates a very heavy tension during an already tense final mission.

So Mass Effect 2 is a very smart, very well-executed third-person RPG-Shooter hybrid hyphen-palooza which deserves every award it got. At times challenging both from a gameplay perspective and a narrative one, it succeeds in every way. I can’t wait for the third one to come out so I can waste another thirty hours of my life in this beautifully realized space.