Mass Effect was incredibly ambitious – huge emphasis on exploring space, an epic yet personal choice and character driven story, third person combat that tries to also be a complex action RPG. All on the scale never done before and rarely tried after. Mass Effect 2 is ambitious in a very different way. Instead of going so big and grand, it tries to go simple and detailed. It simplifies most of the things and focuses only on what it can do well, and then does it exceptionally well. Going straight from the first game into the second one feels weird – the sequel feels so different, yet, somehow, so right.
Where Mass Effect 1 was a nerdy game for space and sci-fi nerds giving you a huge galaxy to explore and get lost in, Mass Effect 2 is an action packed adventure of a space cop and his awesome crew. The change of focus is in everything. The exploration aspect is almost entirely gone – there are no planets to explore, only missions to do. Missions that are incredibly linear even if they involve a vehicle to the point of locking you from going back to previous parts of the location at each checkpoint in most of them and making a lot of items you can find (for quests or for your equipment) one-off missables. The huge and confusing mess of skills and background RPG elements and mechanics is distilled to mostly action-focused stuff that is easy to understand. Social skills are directly tied to Paragon/Renegade scores, hacking no longer tied to a skill but available as a basic thing any character can do, weapon proficiency being not a skill but a limit to weapons the characters can carry, while the actual action bits being determined mostly by player skill rather than numbers and dice rolls.
The game is now purely about cinematic action RPG/third person shooting and damn if it wasn’t really well done. Pretty much every dialogue, every location, every character, every cutscene, every scene is made to look and feel good. Where Mass Effect 1 was going for the very grainy, very “mysteries of the universe filled with unknown” kind of look and feel, Mass Effect 2 is all about style and visual flourish. It’s colourful, it’s punchy, it’s what you’d get if a talented crew was asked to create a high budget ensemble cast heist movie based on the Mass Effect universe and it kicks ass. I remember being amazed at how much thought was put into making the lights in all scenes look great, the design and writing of all characters being memorable back in 2010 and today in 2018 it’s still incredible and looks even better in 4K.
Plays better too. Because of those simplifications I’ve mentioned, you barely ever care about something unnecessary and focus on just the fun parts. Action is a bit too formulaic for cover shooters of the same era (and thus dependent on arenas), yet still tries to be varied. And is considerably less boring than the first game. All classes now feel truly unique, with their own defining skills and ways to play them. The levels themselves are all varied as well, and, amazingly, sometimes don’t focus on the action at all. Despite being mostly very linear and somewhat simplistic, they completely avoid the copy paste nature of the original game and still manage to cover a lot of different interesting topics and ideas.
Storytelling elements are also improved in many ways. Dialogue feels much more natural not just due to fantastic writing for most characters, but also mechanically, moving away from the idea of repeating dialogue (though not removing it completely) and introducing a rather curious concept of “interrupts” where you can press a button to perform a Paragon or Renegade action during a cutscene or in the middle of the dialogue. In concept, these are great, allowing you, for example, move someone out of the way during the cutscene to save them, or, on the contrary, shoot first when things are getting bad, before the person finished talking. Though on practice, some of them feel questionably tied to the morality system, as they don’t really feel particularly “heroic”/”renegade” in their nature. Some do, though – kicking someone off the top floor of the building with a one-liner still feels fun, and quite obviously “renegade”.
The game also fully embraces some of the jRPG influences BioWare displayed over the years, and as such places far more influence on memorable and stylish characters you hang out with and their stories versus the global picture. Due to that, it somewhat loses itself in its own little overly detailed stories full on character backstories, their interactions and romances and feels like it’s fine to sacrifice some of the universe “lore” if it makes for a more interesting personal story. A lot of bigger questions and politics in this game take a back seat to the fact that you are gathering a cool crew of cool people you like to hang out with to kick some villainous alien butt. With a personal vendetta involved as well, since those villainous aliens quite literally killed you two years before the events of the game. It’s very pulp, very comic book, very over the top and silly, yet done with so much style that it’s incredibly easy to forgive all of the dumb. But it does show how the series move away from some of the original designs and the ideas of what the trilogy should be about, to dedicate more time and resource on other ideas and designs that it wanted to be about.
Despite being much more fun to play than the first game, though, it’s still full on bad choices. Apart from the rather tedious arena-like nature of most encounters, the action can become annoying due to the questionable switch to the “thermal clips” instead of heat dissipation of the first game. Which doesn’t just introduce the lore-based issues that the first game specifically avoided with the weapon design (so you can be in an ancient ruin and not find universal modern ammo lying around), but also the issues of mechanical nature. Specifically, playing with some weapons and with some classes (Infiltrator and sniper rifles specifically) is more annoying than fun because there’s constantly not enough ammo. Another big issue involves the final “suicide mission” that has a few hidden mechanics that are way too hard to predict and can lead to deaths of some of your crew despite your best efforts. The planet exploration has been switched out in place of scanning planets for resources and (occasionally) missions, which is not particularly fun and can become grindy. At least you can probe Uranus. Oh, and the free DLC introduced M44 Hammerhead missions, that were supposed to be the substitute to the planet exploration in M35 Mako, are less of the exploration, and more of the challenge courses in the hovercraft.
Speaking of the DLCs, Mass Effect 2 was released at the time when EA were pumping their games with them. Luckily, the game without them (even the free ones) is extremely good. But then, some of the DLCs this time around are pretty good too. The two companion DLCs are pretty fun, even if the companions from them are made to be of less importance on the story than the rest of the crew. The already mentioned Hammerhead courses DLC is frustrating due to the lack of ability to save and extreme chance of randomly dying. The Project Overlord is a great idea which is full on boring locations and involves a lot of riding on Hammerhead with the same issues this implies. Lair of the Shadow Broker is the most curious DLC since it shows the direction the series probably wanted to go for, including completely unexpected action sequence of riding a flying car and being more on the even more bombastic and cinematic sequences than the main game. It is probably the most inventive and interesting direction the series could’ve taken, though, sadly, it would not come to pass. The Arrival is almost like an afterthought. A tedious story mission created to give a good excuse for the opening of Mass Effect 3 and not much more.
Oh and there is the Genesis DLC which you absolutely must not install at any cost if you are importing the Mass Effect 1 save as it’s a super trashily written interactive comic book retelling of the first game that might play even if you import. And in that case it will overwrite the minor choices (not covered in the comic) with the default ones instead of the ones you’ve made. Speaking of the bad things that were not fixed to this day, the loading in Mass Effect 2 is surprisingly slow and might cause an issue if the loading screen is preceded with an FMV – the game might crash or hang in this case and must be launched with the “-nomoviestartup” parameter.
Overall, getting back to Mass Effect 2 was a blast. It has its issues and it is not exactly the sequel in the scale you would’ve expected after playing the first game. But it’s also one of the absolute best character-driven story-driven action titles out there along with a far less successful and liked Dragon Age 2. It still looks absolutely amazing, going back to the Normandy crew always feels great and it’s fun to play. If you’ve missed the first game, I suppose you might try starting with this one (though you would need that dreadfully written Genesis DLC to customize the backstories). Hell, Mass Effect 2 feels like it could be enjoyed on it’s own, despite being a second entry in the trilogy. And if it’s been a while since you’ve played it before, you might as well give it another go, as the game still holds up great today.