Review: Mass Effect 2 (Xbox 360)

Posted on 25. Apr, 2010 by Chris Evans in Console, PC, Reviews, Xbox 360

What do you feel when you complete a game?  Happiness?  Satisfaction?  Sadness that it’s over?  Relief that you’ve made it to the end alive?

Any well-written, story-driven game should give you some combination of these, but there are a select few, for me at least, that seem to go that little bit further, combining all of the above with a certain something more.  Feelings amplified by a sense of an innate connection with the characters before you and the events that have unfolded, something that can be found in the best examples of most creative media.  The finest example from personal experience is Zelda: Ocarina of Time, followed years later by Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.  And now, somewhat unexpectedly, Mass Effect 2 joins that exclusive list.

It’s no secret that Bioware have a fantastic team of writers, their previous two titles Mass Effect and Dragon Age being testament to this, but they really have raised the bar this time around.  The story itself is a fairly standard tale of an alien threat to humanity, but it is knowing your fate from the outset that really drives the narrative.  You are made aware early on that your final task will be a suicide mission, which gives an extra poignancy to your task of assembling a crew to accompany you.  Each crew member you appoint will come to you with a story of their past, and a ‘loyalty mission’ to help them resolve their issues and in turn become fully committed to your cause.  These missions are among the best the game has to offer, delving into the rich universe Bioware have created and connecting you with the characters.

But while that side of what makes and RPG ticks all the right boxes, the other side is not what you may expect.  There is very little in the way of class specialisation, no tech trees, no armour variations other than a few aesthetic choices, no loot drops from enemies other than ammo, no endless lists of random items and only a handful of weapons to choose from.

And it’s all the better for it.

It may not please the most hardcore of RPG fans, but these omissions streamline everything beautifully.  The amount of weapons and upgrades is sufficient to give you some choice in your approach without bogging you down in endless lists.  The same goes for levelling up your character.  You and each member of your squad has only four or five powers to upgrade, but once again, it’s just enough.

The biggest complaint levelled against Mass Effect was surrounding the combat mechanics.  The problem with any game that straddles two genres is getting the balance between the two right, and the gunplay in Mass Effect felt tacked on, rather than an integral part of the design.  This time around though, the two are far more balanced, perhaps even leaning more towards the shooter side than an RPG.  The same thing I said in my preview last year rings true with the final product – Mass effect 2 feels less like an RPG with shooter elements, and more like a fully realised shooter-RPG.

Some will say Mass Effect 2 has been dumbed down for the mass market, that the RPG elements have been all but ripped out to give it broader appeal or that it’s trying to win over the Call of Duty market.  The truth is though, that Mass Effect 2 so fantastic a game that matters of genre or market are redundant.  Whatever type of game you like, Mass Effect will have something for you.  It’s a rare thing to find a game this absorbing and characters this engrossing, and Mass Effect 2 is surely one of the greatest games this generation has had to offer.

EA provided us with a copy of Mass Effect 2 for review purposes