Our hands-on with Mass Effect 2 seemed custom built to show off everything that has been improved from the first game.  Remember early in Mass Effect where you visit a nightclub and end up in a shoot out in the surrounding corridors?  Well guess where this demo takes place?

While the general aesthetic of the environments is similar, the scope and detail is hugely improved.  The club feels like an individual location and not just another set of the cookie cutter rooms that the first game suffered from.  There are a far greater number of people, aliens, creatures and things present too, giving the whole place a more living, breathing feel.  This first section had a couple of people to speak to, though we were asked to only choose dialogue options on the right of the conversation wheel, as some of those on the left contained story spoilers.  The conversation system is unchanged (if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it and all that), but the facial animations have seen a definite improvement.  After talking to some kind of mob member, during which time my analogue stick strayed to the left accidentally (honest) and I had to be casually reminded what I should and shouldn’t be looking at, I headed to the bar for a drink.  Sadly, someone had it in for me and my drink was spiked with some kind of space-poison, killing me there and then.  Feeling somewhat stupid, I was relieved to find that this is supposed to happen in the demo, to move you on to the second section.

After meeting up with a familiar face, a group of mercenary robots attack and I was finally let loose with the small arsenal strapped to Shepard’s back.  The combat in Mass Effect may have been somewhat clunky, but the action here is far smoother and easy to control.  The cover system; switching between weapons, ammo types and abilities; and directing your squad works as well as any other third-person shooter.  Just how much you use your squad will apparently be up to you though.  Ray Muzyka, General Manager and CEO of BioWare, told me that “While you can take full control of your squad in combat, their AI is more than capable of looking after them while you fight.”  In the final part of the demo a huge robot attacks you, so I directed my squad to deal with the remaining smaller enemies while I dealt with the larger threat, and pleasingly they more or less did exactly what I asked of them.

I also asked Ray Muzyka about their future plans for downloadable content (DLC).  Mass Effect was supposed to be an ever-expanding universe, with new planets and crafts added over time.  In reality though, there was only an asteroid and a space station out there in the depths of space, and they came to us 6 months apart.  Ray assured me that the DLC plans for Mass Effect 2 will be far greater reaching, and while they are understandably not talking about anything yet, there is already a team in place working on further content.

The story of Mass Effect 2 centres around the insect-like Collectors, who are responsible for the mass disappearance of humans throughout the galaxy.  Few details are known (despite my accidental efforts), but Muzyka promises a darker, more personal story this time around.  With three months to iron out the minor graphical niggles in the demo, Mass Effect 2 is looking like being a far more rounded game than its predecessor, feeling less like an RPG with shooter elements, and more like a fully cohesive shooter-RPG.