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A BRIEF TREATISE ON MY INTENSE ENJOYMENT OF MASS EFFECT 2

Mass Effect 2 (henceforth ME2) is the most fun I can remember ever having playing a video game.

MASS EFFECT 2
Platform: Xbox 360
Publisher: Electronic Arts

I'm not saying it's the best game I've ever played (that's probably Portal, from The Orange Box; possibly Chrono Trigger, Super Metroid, or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night; or maybe Tetris). I'm sure I've enjoyed other games more than this one, and it's not without its flaws, but I'm actually angry at BioWare at this point. ME2 is so good it's robbed me of the ability to appreciate other games. I have this big stack of games I'm supposed to play because I need to review them, and I don't want to play any of them because whenever I do, I find myself thinking "Man, ME2 is so much better than this. Why am't I playing that instead?" This is not hyperbole. This is not my Pokémon Platinum review. This is a real thing that's happening to me now. I don't want to let it affect my non-ME2 reviewing, but it's hard going.

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Of course, I'm happier with BioWare than I am angry at them. I mean, hello, I just played the most fun video game of my life. By the way, did you know my birthday is January 26th? I mention this because ME2 launched on January 26th, which makes it like BioWare sent me a birthday present. Thank you, BioWare! I forgive you for Dragon Age: Origins! Now release some more goddamn ME2 downloadable content so I can justify playing through the game again! I don't care if it's not free!

(Who am I kidding? I don't need downloadable content to justify playing through it again. More in-depth discussion of DLC later in the review, by the way.)

So. I suppose I should describe this fucker.

ME2 is a science fiction third-person-shooter/role-playing-game hybrid, sequel to 2007's Mass Effect. In it, you, the player, assume the role of Commander Shepard (!!), a character whose first name, appearance, gender, background, and professional history you determine. Except for the name, all these choices affect the content you see in the game to a greater or lesser extent, although your background and professional history in ME2 don't affect things nearly as much as they did in ME1.

You also get to choose Shepard's morality, which comes up during play in dialogue choices. Sometimes, this merely determines whether you come across as neutral, noble, or a jerk. Sometimes it's to express approval or disapproval with the actions of certain other characters, and a few times you get to choose the outcome of the situations you encounter. Because of the extent to which these decisions shape the content you experience, it's the best electronic role-playing game I've encountered.

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I need to qualify that statement because some of you, those of you who play a lot of console or computer role-playing games, may be rolling your eyes and are almost certainly calling me crazy. ME2 doesn't have complex inventory management. It doesn't have loot drops. You can only go to level 30 and characters don't have a lot of stats—far fewer than they did in ME1. The gameplay is real-time, instead of turn-based, and you have to manually aim your guns. It doesn't work the way either Final Fantasy (a Japanse console RPG series) or The Elder Scrolls (a Western computer RPG series) work.

But I used to play tabletop role-playing games, the brainspawn of E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson (both passed, now), and tabletop games birthed the Ultima series of computer RPGs. Tabletop games and the Ultima series, together, birthed Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, the two big JRPG series. All RPGs spring from tabletop, and in tabletop, the definition of a role-playing game is a game where you create your character, choose that character's personality, and dictate the decisions your character makes. Final Fantasy VII came with a premade cast, and at no point did the player get to meaningfully choose, for example, whether Cloud would rather pursue the romantic affections of Aeris, Tifa, or Yuffie (or Barret or Cid for that matter; more on gay romance below). I'm not going to discuss the quality of Final Fantasy VII's character arcs, but they were inarguably pre-written.

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Mass Effect 2, though it is much more a third-person shooter in the tradition of Gears of War than it is a CRPG in the tradition of Final Fantasy, allows the player a level of meaningful input on the decisions of a player-created role far greater than anything in any other video game I've ever seen. It is, therefore, the best CRPG I've played, though it is not a CRPG by common metrics. Streamlined character advancement and a lack of inventory management don't enter into it.

Back to description. Plot!

At the very beginning of the game, Commander Shepard dies.

Then the Commander's corpse—male or female, depending on what you choose when starting your game—is recovered, by certain characters who, having witnessed the events of the first game, decide that Shepard is the only human being capable of rallying the disparate alien races of the galaxy to fight off a threat of such magnitude that it threatens all of galactic civilization, a threat so huge the only way the galactic government has been able to deal with it without going insane is to convince themselves it doesn't exist. This group uses cutting-edge bullshit-powered future medical technology and two years to bring Shepard back to life, during which time the galaxy thinks Shepard is dead, and all the characters from the first game move on with their lives. This gives ME2 the opportunity to introduce a (mostly) new cast of teammates.

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If you played the first Mass Effect (and I did, quite a lot; it was the first, and to this day only, Xbox 360 game for which I have all the Achievements (although soon ME2 will be the second)), you can import your ME1 Shepard into ME2. This lets you keep your previous Shepard's name and history: both the history you established when creating your Shepard at the beginning of the first game, and the events you played through—which characters lived or died, whether you managed to save the colony on Feros or had to destroy it, which romantic partner you pursued (if you pursued any of them), the outcomes of many minor subplots, and finally how you chose to end it. Almost every decision you make on an ME1 playthrough affects the ME2 playthrough somehow. No other game series tries this, because the amount of interdependence here is insane—in most series where you play the same character through multiple games, either you have no effect on the ending or you do, but the sequel assumes one ending is official and that's where the plot goes even if it's not the ending you chose.

If you don't import an old character, the game assumes that nearly everyone who could die in ME1 did die, so you won't encounter a bunch of confusing references to events you don't recognize.

Note that Mass Effect is going to be at least a trilogy, and BioWare is already working on the third game. They've said in interviews and press releases that your choices in ME2 will affect the events you encounter in ME3, and even some of the choices from ME1 that seemed to have minor effects in ME2 will go on to have major effects come the third game in the series. This is the other reason why I call ME2, and Mass Effect as a whole, the best CRPG I've played. In tabletop role-playing games, one of the big interesting things you can do that you can't do in other narrative forms is to have the setting changed significantly by the choices the players make, and no other video games allow such far-reaching consequences to play out based on player choice the way the Mass Effect series does.

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For my first ME2 playthrough I imported Tsuriko Shepard (in retrospect I wish I'd named her something else), a female Ruthless Spacer (she grew up on military starships, and thanks to her actions against the slaver enclave on the planet Torfan has a scary reputation for getting the job done even at tremendous cost of lives). The very first bit of dialogue I heard referenced the way I ended the first game—as a moral paragon, oddly. Throughout the first game I had intended to play her as someone who wants to be an idealist but who nevertheless takes the cruel, pragmatic route when no alternative presents itself, but the game kept offering her the chance to take the higher moral road and still achieve victory. By the end of the game, she had become, in my mind, someone who felt immensely blessed to have done as well as she did, though a bit fearful her luck would run out and she'd be forced to once again live up to her reputation as the Butcher of Torfan.

My Shepard was female in the first game because as a character, Shepard is fully-voiced by either Mark Meer or Jennifer Hale. Mark Meer does an OK job, although I think he comes off as kinda wooden, but Jennifer Hale gives a much better performance. If you want the highest quality game experience, I suggest making your Shepard female, too. But, you know, it's up to you.

Now, gameplay.

It's a squad-based third-person shooter with character levels. In addition to having guns, you have powers--which guns and which powers you have depend on which class you choose at the beginning of the game. You gain levels with experience points (XP), but you don't get XP for killing enemies; instead you get it for completing missions and assignments.

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The three pure classes are Soldier, who plays nice and simple with a bullet-time power and the biggest guns; Engineer, who can hack synthetic enemies, overload shields, and spawn a drone minion to harass foes; and Adept, who makes use of the game's titular mass effect fields to control gravity and can employ telekinetic powers called biotics to toss enemies around like ragdolls.

The three hybrid classes are Infiltrator, who uses soldier and engineer powers to cloak and play assassin; Sentinel, who uses engineer and biotic powers to erect powerful armor and shred enemies with indirect attacks; and Vanguard, who uses soldier and biotic powers to pull enemies out from behind cover or rip them apart up close and personal with shotguns. (Tsuriko Shepard is a Vanguard--it plays nice.)

Each class plays distinctly. In theory this offers a lot of replay value. In practice, I'm not sure--I tend to just keep playing as Vanguard. I think instead of offering replay value, the classes mostly ensure that you can play the game in a style you enjoy, whether you'd prefer to pretend it's a Call of Duty title or whether you like the idea of hiding behind cover and damaging enemies with what are, in essence, psychic bolts.

At any point you can hit the left or right bumper to pause the game and bring up the weapon and power wheels—this pauses the action for a moment when you change weapons or select powers, although you can also queue two of your powers to left and right bumper taps, for use without pausing. (And each class has a unique skill always set to Y.) Bringing up the power wheel also allows you to look around and see nearby enemies, and to give orders to your two squadmates. So if you're playing as a soldier but you have a biotic ally, you can use your ally's powers to toss enemies around and bring them into your field of fire, or to engage a foe who's sneaking up behind you. Unlike in ME1, in ME2 you can control your allies separately with the D-pad, sending them off to specific places or having them target specific enemies with gunfire. This is a big improvement.

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Another major change from ME1 is the addition of an ammo mechanic. In the first game, guns had unlimited ammo. (Justified in the fiction as each gun carrying a metal block—the gun uses a shaped force-field to cut pellets off during combat, which are then magnetically accelerated; any given gun has enough ammo to last for an arbitrarily large, but not unlimited, number of gunfights. The blocks are automatically replaced offscreen between missions.) In the place of ammo, ME1 had overheating—fire a gun too much and too fast, and it overheats and becomes disabled for several seconds, during which you can't use it and had best switch to another weapon. In ME2, guns vent heat into thermal clips, which must be replaced like ammo magazines, although since thermal clips are standardized you don't have to keep track of separate types for assault rifles and shotguns.

I'm not sure I like thermal clips. In theory they prevent you from just using the same weapon all the time, and provide incentive to move to the center of the battlefield where enemies have been dropping thermal clips. In practice I rarely run out, and I miss the simplicity of ME1's overheating mechanic. But I'm not really dissatisfied with the change.

Just as important as the combat in Mass Effect games is the talking. ME2's dialogue system is basically unchanged from ME1. During dialogue-based cut scenes a dialogue wheel appears at the bottom of the screen which lets you choose from up to six speech options. Upper ("Paragon") options tend to be idealistic, while lower ("Renegade") options tend to be ruthless. Middle options are a compromise. Options to the left tend to make conversations longer; options to the right bring them closer to conclusion. Sometimes you will see a blue or a red dialogue option--these are special and change the game's plot. You never get to see exactly what Shepard will say—you just get sort of a quick summary. The actual lines Shepard delivers are longer, and can surprise you. I like this--it makes watching the dialogue scenes feel like watching a movie.

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The downside of this is, sometimes you'll choose a dialogue option that you expect has one connotation, but it makes Shepard say something you didn't foresee. The worst offender I can think of was in ME1 when I was talking to a squadmate about his opinion on aliens and he said something about not completely trusting them, and the option I chose on the dialogue wheel said "This is because of your training." I expected Shepard to say something like "Oh, you're trained to be sceptical of the motives of people you don't understand. Smart!" but what Shepard actually said amounted to "This is because you had traumatic experiences with aliens when you were growing up, and now you're a bigot." And then he got all defensive and the conversation sort of went in a direction I didn't like. I can't really think of any egregious examples of this in ME2, but that's mostly because I'd fully internalized upper response = idealistic, lower response = jerk, so for me it almost always worked well. It may surprise you if you're not familiar with it.

In ME1, you needed to spend skill points on the Charm and Intimidate skills to unlock the plot-shaping blue or red responses. Every point spent on one of those two skills was a point you couldn't spend on a combat skill. You accrued Paragon and Renegade scores depending on what actions you took, but these scores only allowed you to purchase higher ranks of Charm and Intimidate.

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In ME2, there are no Charm or Intimidate skills, and your Paragon and Renegade scores themselves unlock more difficult blue and red responses. Each class has a class skill that buffs their health and weapon damage and also increases both your effective Paragon and Renegade scores, so points spent to access more dialogue also make your Shepard more formidable in combat. I applaud BioWare for this awareness of opportunity cost this time. (Now picture me glaring at Dragon Age: Origins.)

The other major addition is the interrupts. In ME1, you would sometimes get an option on the dialogue wheel like [Shoot him] or [Punch her]. In ME2, instead, you'll get a flashing blue icon on the left of the screen or a flashing red icon on the right while another character is talking. When you see that icon, you can pull the left or right trigger on the control pad to interrupt the conversation with a Paragon or Renegade action. These are almost always fun and also, usually pretty funny. The one I will spoil for you because it's not terribly funny is when you can use a Paragon interrupt to push someone out of the way of a gunshot—handy, if you want to keep talking to her afterwards. The interrupts are fucking great. They're also easy to spot and you're given plenty of time to hit them, so it's not a matter of mastering a set of quick-time events.

Concerning structure and length: ME2 is… what, 30 hours long? 25? I think I spent somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 hours on my first playthrough, but I have a computer screen set just beside my console game screen, so I will sometimes let a game sit idle for 10 minutes between missions while I browse the Internet. This inflates my play time a bit. I find it disappointingly short only in the sense that I want more of it.

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The game's structure is pretty simple—Shepard has a mission. To carry this mission out, Shepard needs to recruit a team. You have your space ship, the Normandy SR-2, and you fly between planets recruiting characters—all the characters (save two) are recruited during a recruitment mission. Each character also has an issue that's weighing on his or her mind, potentially distracting them. You deal with these issues through loyalty missions.

Missions are usually structured like levels in a shooter such as Modern Warfare 2. A simple example: The guy you want is being held in an enemy compound, and you need to break him out. With ten characters on disc, all ten of which who have loyalty missions and eight of whom have recruitment missions, that's 18 major missions, plus some plot missions in the beginning and middle, and then the big endgame mission where you've built your team up and are finally ready to do what you've been getting ready to do since the beginning of the game.

Each mission tends to take from 15 minutes to half an hour if you're fast, or up to an hour if you're doing them for the first time. Between missions you explore hub worlds—various space stations and inhabited planets with shops and people to talk to—or talk with your crewmates on the Normandy. The game is also full of assignments, minor mission-like things that can take between 5 and 15 minutes, this could be anything from helping a random person you meet on a hub world to touching down on an uncharted planet to investigate a distress call.

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The best missions play like episodes of a really good SF television show or short film (I am thinking, specifically, of Tali's loyalty mission). The worst of them plays like a decent level of a pretty good shooter video game. I can't think of a single mission where the content disappointed me, except, possibly, the final mission, which I felt was a bit too short for all the buildup it got.

Two places where ME2 improves on ME1: Lack of repetitive environments or a big, boring Citadel. When visiting alien worlds in ME1, you tended to see a lot of buildings that looked exactly alike. ME2 doesn't have that. And when you visit the Citadel in ME2, you visit a different portion, which is smaller and has less to do. That feels like it should be a complaint, but it isn't—I liked being able to revisit the Citadel, but I'm glad I could complete my business there quickly and leave, instead of running around for two hours doing fetch quests. ME2 is less repetitive and whisks you off to see new places quicker. It also doesn't have interminable elevator rides.

Now I'll talk about downloadable content.

New copies of the game come with a code you can use to connect to something BioWare has chosen to call the Cerberus Network. If you do not have this code, Cerberus Network access costs about $15 worth of Microsoft Points. Access to the Cerberus Network entitles you to "free" downloadable content—which is, obviously, not free if you had to pay for your Cerberus Network access because, say, you bought the game used. At the time of this writing, the downloadable content available is Zaeed Massani, a new character for your party and a new mission to take him on; another new mission where Shepard visits the crash site of the Normandy SR-1, which was your starship in the first game; and a new set of armor for Shepard and more powerful shotgun usable by any character with shotgun-weapon proficiency. Supposedly, in the future, they will also release the Hammerhead, a hovertank that fills the same role in ME2 the Mako ground vehicle filled in ME1, only not so aggravating. Presumably it will come with missions that actually need a hovertank.

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At some point there's also supposed to be for-pay DLC, available to anyone regardless of whether they have Cerberus Network access or not. Obviously I can't review any of this content but I feel the need to mention it here.

Now is the point where, because I try to be an actual critic and not just a shill and a hack, I discuss the game's faults. In my review of the first Mass Effect I skipped over them because that review was for print and so I had a limited word count, and I wanted to focus on what was important to me at the time, but this review is web-only which means I can go on for however long I want, and at 4,000 words and counting so far, this bastard is already the longest review I've ever written for Vice. Why not say everything I want to say?

The game's biggest problem as I see it is this: Lack of gay romance options.

Because the player can choose so much of Shepard's characterization—gender, appearance, history, attitude, aptitudes—the game encourages the player to identify strongly with their version of Shepard. I am not Tsuriko Shepard at all, but as a character I feel like she spontaneously assembled herself from parts presented to me. I have spoken to at least two gay people who, while playing ME2, have expressed frustration because in their own minds, the Shepard they created, and the Shepard they play, is gay—this may or may not be a choice they made, but only the result of the character assembling himself organically in their heads—only the game doesn't present them the option to express this. It wouldn't be a problem, except the game gives them the option to express almost every other element of the Shepard-personality they create. It's an oversight.

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This is especially aggravating in light of this issue's history.

ME1 has a lesbian romance—well, sort of a lesbian romance, seeing as how it's with a mono-gendered race of blue-skinned aliens, which is to say, a race of aliens who are all blue-skinned alien space babes who can breed with members of any other species regardless of the second partner's gender. The party member of this species, Liara, could be romanced by both male and female Shepards. But ME1 did not have a gay male romance.

In ME2 there are no official gay romances at all, although if you import a character who romanced Liara in the first game, the reunion scene features a kiss, whether you're playing a male or female Shepard.

(Yes, Tsuriko Shepard romanced Liara in the first game and pined for her throughout the second, ignoring all the sequel's new romance options. BioWare mentioned that if you do a romance in the first game and then do another one in the second game with an import character, there'll be consequences in the third game. My Shepard didn't cheat.)

In ME2 you can also romance a flirty female crewmember, regardless of whether you're playing a male or female Shepard. However, it's not an official romance because, er, completing it doesn't get you the Paramour Achievement, which is the Achievement you get for completing one of the game's romances. The very game mechanics dismiss the legitimacy of the relationship! And once again there are no gay male romance options.

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It may seem like a small thing if you're not the sort to want to play a male Shepard who likes mansex, but… look, here's a statement made by BioWare's Dr. Ray Muzyka in a February 7th, 2010 IGN interview, on the topic of why there's gay male romance in Dragon Age: Origins but not ME2:

"Here's how the games are different: Dragon Age is a first person narrative, where you're taking on an origin and a role, and you are that character at a fundamental level. It's fundamentally about defining your character, including those kinds of concepts. In Mass Effect it's more a third-person narrative, where you have a pre-defined character who is who he is, or she is. But it's not a wide-open choice matrix. It's more choice on a tactical level with a pre-defined character. So they're different types of narratives, and that's intentional.
"We're not saying that one approach is better than the other. In our previous games, as we did in Jade Empire, as we did in KOTOR, as we did in Baldur's Gate, and many games before and in the future, we enable those kinds of choices, whereas in Mass Effect it's more about Shepard as a defined character with certain approaches and worldviews, and that's just who he or she is. So we constrain the choice set somewhat, but enable more tactical choices and enable a deeper, richer personality, because it's more focused around defining one character, it's not as wide open. But that's by choice.
"It's first person versus third person narrative, and the types of choices you get to make within that are related to that, whether you've got a pre-defined character or a wide-open character. Some of our games have been wide open, and some have been more constrained, and we'll probably continue both kinds of character development in the future."

So, to review: The player can choose Shepard's gender, appearance, attitude, aptitudes, and history. If the player is playing a female character, the player can choose Shepard's sexual orientation, provided the character is an ME1 import or only into a casual fling with her secretary. But, if the player is playing a male Shepard, the character's sexuality is pre-defined because Shepard, in that regard, is a pre-defined character. And this is a creative choice on the part of the developers that somehow strengthens the artistic integrity of the work.

I am all for artists being able to stand by their creative decisions, even if those decisions feel ill-thought, and I don't even want to play a gay male Shepard, but something feels really off about this to me.

Enough about that.

ME2's other problems feel a lot more trivial.

The balance is off at the higher difficulties. On the Casual, Normal, and Veteran difficulties, all the classes stack up to each other equally. On Hardcore and Insanity, the Adept and Vanguard start to fall behind. It has to do with a quirk of the damage system. Enemies have multiple types of hit points that stack on top of each other—health on the bottom, and then either armor or shields or both on top of that. To damage an enemy's health, you need to completely deplete their armor or shields. The biotic powers that fling enemies around only affect enemies that have just health remaining, and the biotic classes tend to make up for lower normal damage with the ability to instantly kill, or at least remove from the fight temporarily, enemies that only have health—that is to say, the majority of enemies, at least on Casual through Veteran, where only elite enemies have armor or shields. But on Hardcore and Insanity, every enemy has armor or a shield. This doesn't affect how non-biotic classes behave because for them, armor and shielding is just more health, but for biotic classes armor isn't "just more health" at all.

It's not a big deal. I'm happy just playing through on Veteran with my Vanguard. I'll do a separate Soldier playthrough to beat the game on Insanity. But it grates--it's an imperfection in an otherwise exemplary game.

The mineral-scanning game can be boring. Instead of collecting equipment dropped by enemies, in ME2 you find or research new technologies to upgrade your weapons and armor. To implement this research, you need minerals—platinum, palladium, iridium, or element zero (the fake bullshit magic element that powers the game's fake bullshit mass effect technology and psychic powers). You can get minerals in two ways—find small amounts of refined minerals in missions, or fly around and scan planets from orbit, dropping probes on mineral hotspots. To do this you move a scanning reticule around the planet's surface while holding the L trigger, then pull the R trigger to launch a probe. I don't really dislike it, per se, and I find the tactile experience of holding one trigger to scan and pulling the other to probe pleasant, but it takes a long time. I wish it were quicker.

Finally the game has the worst implementation of NewGame+ I've ever seen. NewGame+ is a term that springs from Chrono Trigger, where after beating the game you could start again, importing your old characters and keeping their level, inventory, and treasury. In ME2, you get to keep your level, but not your inventory or treasury, which means you need to scan for minerals and buy all your tech upgrades again.

Also, if you import an ME1 character, you get bonus Paragon or Renegade scores based on how high those meters were when you beat the first game. This produces an interesting effect—if you ended the first game with a high Paragon, you get bonus Paragon in the second, which means you don't need to make as many Paragon choices to get to the highest Paragon rating. So it's actually easier to play a semi-Renegade character in ME2 while still retaining access to the most difficult Paragon choices if you import a pure Paragon ME1 character than it would be if you'd imported a wishy-washy character, or not imported a character at all. I'm not complaining about this, precisely—it seems counterintuitive, but having more leeway lets you portray a more nuanced Shepard. As rewards go for importing a character, that's pretty great.

But in NewGame+ mode, both your Paragon and Renegade scores reset to zero. When I imported Tsuriko Shepard from ME1, she started with 190 Paragon points. When I re-imported her from her ME2 endgame save to play again, she started with zero Paragon points, so I was almost immediately locked out of certain dialogue options I had enjoyed making during my first playthrough. My NewGame+ Shepard was significantly less fun to play than she had been the first time around, and it wasn't long before I abandoned that and just re-imported her from ME1. I would rather start at low-level with a high Paragon score than start at high level with no Paragon score, especially since starting at high level didn't let me keep any of the content that had been annoyingly difficult and time-consuming to accumulate. So, if you are playing an import character, NewGame+ mode is horrible and you won't want to use it.

Still, though. Despite its problems, Mass Effect 2 really is the most fun I can remember having with a video game. You should play it. I'd like to have a longer concluding paragraph here, but I'm not sure what else of substance there is to say. Should I say the game comes on two discs, and that after you play the prologue you need to switch over to Disc 2, and then switch back to Disc 1 for the final mission? That didn't bother me. I guess I haven't mentioned the graphics—a significant improvement over ME1, with no slow-loading textures and far less flickery self-shadowing. I haven't mentioned the music either, beautiful stuff by Jack Wall, who did the soundtracks to Myst III and IV. But neither of those things are surprising; it's a big, important release, so of course it looks and sounds fantastic.

STEPHEN LEA SHEPPARD