

Platform: Xbox 360
Publisher: Electronic ArtsI'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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"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
