Mass Effect 2 released last month, and its Metascore is sitting at 96/100. No surprise, since we fans have waited three whole years for the middle child of the sci-fi sequel.
There's an inherent paradox within game reviews: people rave about wonderful games, but ignore the larger flaws, in the interest of keeping alive the pandering to the masses to give a game a positive mark. See: Bayonetta, Uncharted 2: Drake's Fortune, Gears of War 2, Halo: ODST -- you get the idea. Games earn critical acclaim almost out of a compulsion of said industry to bow down to the hype being manufactured by the games' publishers.
That being said, Mass Effect 2 avoids the "quick fix" pitfall, and presents a complex, and complete, epoch within a larger narrative. Don't let anyone tell you that it drags on and on, as Seth Schiesel of The New York Times said in his review...the game engages you in such a way to where you feel a deep connection to the characters. I wanted to help them, and see to it that they survived the course of the game. Only Bioware can make a game that has characters that are more real and more compelling than most people we encounter in our daily lives. They have stories to tell, knowledge to share, and most important of all, bloodlust to exercise.
Bioware aimed for a more real-time experience, and they got it. Pauses in the combat are gone, everything can be hotkeyed, and the framerate never -- I said never -- drops. Voice-acting is exceptional, with some pretty well-known people chiming in with small roles along the journey, as well as the big gun, Martin Sheen, anchoring the main crux of the story. Unlike the first game, the story is a little murkier, and, the decisions are equally as murky. When you think you want to do something heroic, you end up doing something cold-blooded. The story even has a fair amount of surprise, and major plot developments are reserved for when you aren't expecting it. Very rarely do I play a game where by the end, I'm actually rooting for everything to turn out OK.
As is to be expected with such a huge (read: ambitious) game, there are slight flaws. A few graphical glitches here and there, but nothing that will break the game. During my playthrough, the audio cut out a few times during some dialogue scenes, which was a nuisance, because if there aren't subtitles, one may miss critical information. Sometimes the combat didn't go as expected, and I was left scrambling around not knowing what to do, or, I would unknowingly commit some egregious error and would be forced to reload to an earlier point, or hope that an autosave kicked in right before that point. Planet scanning is somewhat cool, but can be annoying if one is forced to do a lot of it in one sitting. Here's hoping DLC comes out of all these planets that aren't able to be explored yet.
My personal favorite from the game is being able to choose research upgrades on the Normandy's computer. People complained that the role-playing element had been eliminated, but, it's right here! Just because there's no more irritating inventory system or the character customization has been altered doesn't mean there isn't a way to choose how to play the game. It'd be nice if there were more weapons, yes, but to remove the unnecessary complexity of managing everything in the game is genius. The character classes function much better without having to spend time tweaking how it behaves. There's a set number of abilities, and choose carefully how the level points are spent, and it's a piece of cake after that.
If Bioware's goal was to outdo every single facet of the first game, mission accomplished.
Bioware aimed for a more real-time experience, and they got it. Pauses in the combat are gone, everything can be hotkeyed, and the framerate never -- I said never -- drops. Voice-acting is exceptional, with some pretty well-known people chiming in with small roles along the journey, as well as the big gun, Martin Sheen, anchoring the main crux of the story. Unlike the first game, the story is a little murkier, and, the decisions are equally as murky. When you think you want to do something heroic, you end up doing something cold-blooded. The story even has a fair amount of surprise, and major plot developments are reserved for when you aren't expecting it. Very rarely do I play a game where by the end, I'm actually rooting for everything to turn out OK.
As is to be expected with such a huge (read: ambitious) game, there are slight flaws. A few graphical glitches here and there, but nothing that will break the game. During my playthrough, the audio cut out a few times during some dialogue scenes, which was a nuisance, because if there aren't subtitles, one may miss critical information. Sometimes the combat didn't go as expected, and I was left scrambling around not knowing what to do, or, I would unknowingly commit some egregious error and would be forced to reload to an earlier point, or hope that an autosave kicked in right before that point. Planet scanning is somewhat cool, but can be annoying if one is forced to do a lot of it in one sitting. Here's hoping DLC comes out of all these planets that aren't able to be explored yet.
My personal favorite from the game is being able to choose research upgrades on the Normandy's computer. People complained that the role-playing element had been eliminated, but, it's right here! Just because there's no more irritating inventory system or the character customization has been altered doesn't mean there isn't a way to choose how to play the game. It'd be nice if there were more weapons, yes, but to remove the unnecessary complexity of managing everything in the game is genius. The character classes function much better without having to spend time tweaking how it behaves. There's a set number of abilities, and choose carefully how the level points are spent, and it's a piece of cake after that.
If Bioware's goal was to outdo every single facet of the first game, mission accomplished.
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