I’m not sure whether Mass Effect 2 was the victim of lazy designers or the two-year development cycle. It could easily be both. Either way, it seems to me that BioWare chose to throw away everything that was broken rather than fixing it or appropriately replacing it. What they removed wasn’t vital to the central gameplay, though. As a result it’s kind of like taking a lightweight motorcycle that’s rusted down, removing all the broken bits of motor and other non-computer technobabble, and adding a pair of pedals on it so you can use it like a normal bike.

It’s functioning, but it’s not a fixed motorcycle. It’s either a really heavy bike or a piece of trash motorcycle that is more broken than before.

I suppose it’s not quite the most accurate example. After all, planet scanning has now gone from a simple button press on a small selection of worlds to being able to scour the surface of every planetoid in the game. Unfortunately this “improvement” is also the replacement for exploring planets in the Mako. What used to be a flawed yet interesting system of interstellar exploration has now been replaced by aiming a doohickey over a planet and telling the game where to probe.

It is so tempting to include a joke about Uranus here, especially since you literally can probe the planet in the game, but…well, it’s like taking candy from a baby. Unless you are another, more malicious, baby then there’s no challenge involved and thus nothing to be proud of. You’re just kind of a douchebag.

What was I talking about? Oh, yes! Mass Effect 2. The entire game is sort of like an amputee victim where the existing limbs are enhanced with cyborg technology, but the missing ones are still, well, missing. In fact, that’s a much better analogy than motorcycle with pedals. Were I a better writer I’d go back and start this review over.

The combat is marginally improved over the first game as a shooter, but at a cost of simplified abilities and fewer statistics. Foes are smarter than before, but they are generally all the same gun-toting mercenary that occasionally has shields or chucks a big psychic blast your way. The inventory system has been “improved” in that there is no inventory system. Instead you buy upgrades that affect your entire crew and are built with the resources obtained scanning the planets. In fact, it makes me wonder if the game may be victim to a third potential antagonist.

The first Mass Effect was built with the intent of selling to your typical RPG gamer. Y’know, the sort of fellow that thinks spreadsheets are a crazy Friday Night activity and has an unhealthy collection of dice. Yet due to the marketing and presence of guns in space! a whole new horde of fans appeared. Those fun loving beer guzzling frat boys whose only question in regards to any new game release is “how many multiplayer maps/modes does it come with?”

Maybe the designers at Bioware weren’t lazy at all, but they had a limit of two years to take their game and now change it to appeal to their new crowd of players that have trouble reading books more advanced than Goosebumps. Given enough time you might be able to make everyone happy, but with just two years to make a new game you gotta cut some corners.

So the ultimate result in Mass Effect 2 is less of the same. It is different enough from the original that the gameplay feels different, but similar enough that it is still a better idea to play Halo, Call of Duty or Half-Life if you want a more shooterific experience. Which only begs the question, why bother? Bioware tried to build a game friendlier to its new gun loving audience only to deliver an inferior experience to any other shooter on the market. The only redeeming values are the concepts that appealed to the original spreadsheet loving audience and those have been lobotomized.

This leaves the highlight of Mass Effect 2 as the story…well, no, that’s not right. More like the characters, though it doesn’t feel as if you get as much time to know them. Even the writing, the strongest part of the game, falls short compared to the original Mass Effect and Dragon Age. The characters remain silent through most of the quests, only occasionally speaking during the main missions. The only time characters are ever really chatty is if you are proceeding through a character specific adventure, in which case your cohorts still continue to be silent. This leaves the only opportunity to get to know them on between-mission break, and there are only so many conversations available. In fact, Garrus and Jacob run out of conversation material long before any of the others (though I imagine this is because I played a male Shepard instead of female? It could be that, as a male character, the conversation options just end once it hits romantic territory instead of being slightly modified so as to not be romantic).

As for the main plot itself, the game literally ends right where it began. Sure, it doesn’t feel that way superficially, but when you consider that Shepard is nowhere closer to beating the Reaper threat then you realize nothing happened. Sure, you might now obtain some piece of technology that could help, but you also might have blown it up. Unless Mass Effect 3 is going to ship with two completely different plot lines, this option will be trivial and remain as ripples in the water rather than full waves. This is nothing to say of some of the leaps in logic and simple bad ideas (though if you’re interested I’m glad to direct you to parts one, two and three of Shamus Young’s analysis).

With that said, is Mass Effect 2 a bad game?

No.

It may have removed a lot of elements that had potential rather than fixing them, and it may feel lobotomized, but it is still a fun game. It’s not quite RPG and it isn’t quite shooter, and it’s certainly inferior to Alpha Protocol (post-patching). However, it is still a good, fun game. The combat doesn’t feel as clunky and the enemy A.I. doesn’t just run in crazy directions or charge right at you. Sometimes it’ll do those things, but most frequently the enemies will actually take cover like intelligent people. While there is less exploration, every mission is customized to be unique rather than recycling the same five or six map segments. The characters are all very interesting, just as they were in the first, with the exception of the token-Bioware-bitch (who actually makes me long for the likes of Ashley and Morrigan). The game manages to reach 40 hours even though the missions are not stretched to become too long and there are no segments spent wasting time exploring nothing. It is filled with story, characters and missions that keep the player active and engaged.

However, it doesn’t feel like an improvement. In some ways it feels more a downgrade than an upgrade, especially when you consider how trilogies like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings had concluded their second segments with some sense of change. Luke lost his hand and discovered Darth Vader was his father and Han Solo was frozen in carbonite to return to Jabba the Hut. Saruman had been taken down putting a major crimp in Sauron’s plans and the men of Rohan were riding to fight alongside Gondor. Yet in Mass Effect the rest of the universe is still oblivious or skeptical to the Reaper threat, which is as close before as it is now. The only real changes may only matter based on what you chose for your characters, but once again, it cannot be all that significant (unless they plan on taking the concept of the suicide mission (a really neat idea) and applying it to every decision in all of Mass Effect to determine the trilogy’s ending, but that’s closer to wishful thinking than anything else).

If anything I’d label Mass Effect 2 as filler. It’s enjoyable filler, but it is filler nonetheless.

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