Review by: Todd Brakke

The original Mass Effect was an intriguing game in that its incredible strength at building memorable characters and crafting a sci-fi story overcame a lot of technical flaws in its gameplay. Mass Effect 2 not only manages to improve on most of what didn’t work from the first game, but it also is able to supersede its predecessor at offering a gripping, ultra-cinematic storyline with still more characters that will live on in your memory long after you’ve finished the game. In short, it’s a game that plays to all of Bioware’s strengths as a developer.

In Mass Effect 2, which has a bit less RPG and a bit more action, you reprise your role as Commander Sheperd. You are brought back into action and tasked with investigating the disappearance of entire human colonies at the edges of civilization and uncovering how their disappearance relates to the threat of invasion from an ancient organic-tech hybrid race known as the Reapers whose return you succeeded in thwarting at the end of the first game. Right from the word go yours is a suicide mission for which, to have any chance at survival, you’ll need to build a team of the most skilled and deadly specialists in the galaxy, while also managing to ensure their loyalty.

Mass Effect 2 is most reminiscent of the old Wing Commander games. True, this is a shooter and not a space-based dogfighting sim, but structurally, the way it separates everything into a series of compressed, individual missions in-between a boatload of extremely well-constructed cinematic scenes still evokes those old Wing Commander memories.

As a shooter, this is a much improved game over the original, which had rather loose controls and squad AI that was often frustrating. In this game you still bring just two members of your assembled squad into each mission, but the entire combat experience is now much smoother, allowing you to make strong use of cover, more easily access and utilize the skills of each squad member, and accurately snipe a droid from 50 meters, or use a biotic skill (sci-fi magic) to levitate it into the air and sending it crashing down to the ground, or override its controls and send it after its allies, or… well, you get the idea. While the character-building RPG elements are significantly reduced, there’s still no shortage of ways to wreak havoc and this time you get the benefit of squad mates who, while not perfect, are much improved at staying alive and out of your line of fire.

The only real problem with the action is the construction of the missions themselves. Environments are no longer nearly as repetitive, but every mission is a straight shot from point A to point B that will take you about an hour to complete. It’s actually a very nice design choice that if you have an hour to kill you’ll know that you can use that time to sit down and knock out a mission. At the same time, it’s also repetitive and restrictive. I found myself constantly wishing for a more Deus Ex style approach to the missions where the type of character profession you selected (there are six in all, ranging from pure solider to tech and biotic specialists) affected how you were able to proceed from a mission’s beginning to its end. The ability to do so would have added back in some of the old-fashioned RPG flavor that this game has lost and offered players a bit more actual gameplay in a title where such gameplay is rather limited.