game review: Mass Effect 2
OK, so like three months later (than everyone else), I finally finished Mass Effect 2. It took me something like 32 hours of play time, and I played through a (matronly) female infiltrator. Man, the female faces are FUG. Urk. They need more women working on this – or was the point to have everyone look like they’d been on the bad end of a bar fight ie “seen some military action”? Something ugly?
Anyway, all in all it was a great game and lots of fun for a casual gamer who is NOT a big fan of the FPS genre. They mixed that up with enough plot and “character development” (not as good as Dragon Age, but better than I expected) to keep things moving along.
Note:
They want you to replay it (there is an achievement for beating it twice, and like 5 difficulty levels), yet they make you sit through the 20-40 minute intro EVERY SINGLE TIME? You can’t skip any part of it AND there’s a couple points where you have to click things and fake “play the game”… so you can’t just go sit in the other room or take a shit while you’re waiting for the intro to end.
Horrid, stupid game design. Seriously, wtf Bioware? Oh, and it’s the same thing if you want to try out different classes… sit through the fucktarded intro. Every. Single. Time.
Anyway, on to the cons:
- Where is the mission map? it’s really obnoxious to have one in town, but not elsewhere. it would make finding the hidden stuff, and certain missions with random visual obstructions, much more pleasant/easier. if they are cutting the map out just for difficulty… that’s dumb.
- No lesbian love interest: dragon age spoiled me. not sure if there is a gay one or not, I wound up playing my female (matronly!) sniper kind of on accident – before my male engineer. probably because the drone seemed stupid and annoying. I did hook her up with an alien with a sharp looking beak-jaw. So there is that.
- Load times: wow. We ARE still living in the 90s. Loading it to the xbox hard drive helped a lot. BUT STILL.
- Overrumble: can’t use the 3rd sniper rifle (and sometimes other guns) with rumble on – and sometimes with rumble off it rumbles anyway (wtf?). Basically, it shakes so hard it knocks the battery loose, disconnecting your controller. Seriously. Googled around and it looks like many others have this issue.
- Hideous female avatar faces: it was really hard for me to make a female that wasn’t really ugly. Compared to dragon age, sims, and a million other games I just have say: WTF? Also, the hair options were SEVERELY lacking for both genders (Dragon Age also had this problem).
- Not enough of an indicator that you’re using “special” ammo. At least not enough that I noticed… the cryo one you can kind of tell, but I never noticed anything for warp or shredder or whatever the other option I had was. BTW: Cryo is actually useful versus those charging+exploding zombies.
Pros:
- Good visuals
- The “cover” system is pretty functional and fun. I haven’t played many (read: 1 other) shooters in the last year or 3, so I don’t know how standard this is. At times I would get stuck behind cover, or I couldn’t “pop out” and shoot correctly, but this was rare. The whole “enemies drawing nearer and they are going to seriously mess you up in melee” is a nice way to add tension – at least for my infiltrator who sucks in melee range.
- Decent story (especially given I skipped the first game and never really figured out what was going on).
- Lots of options for squad choice – although I’m not sure how much of a deal it really makes
- The standard difficulty was pretty well suited to a casual gamer – although I had to turn it down to “casual” (read: “easy”) for two of the bosses.
- Lots of heavy weapon options – but why only 3 for the non-heavy weapons?
- The Paragon/Renegade thing is interesting, although at a couple
- Lots of different mission types. I mean, at the core they are all “kill everything” (except the vehicle missions they just added, which are fairly annoying for lack of a map) BUT they dress it up in a varied enough manner.
- The biotic/tech powers are fairly distinct (although the ammo powers are kinda meh), giving you a good reason to use each and making for some slightly interesting level-up decisions. Also, it’s cool that you get a way to modify them with the tier 4.
All in all, I enjoyed it and I’ll pick up the sequel to see where the story goes. I’m not sure if I’ll have the patience to a) sit through that god-obnoxious intro again and b) actually play it all the way through again.
Also, if I’m going to play this again, I need some kind of infinite ammo code. I get why they do the scarcity of ammo thing, but I just want to worry about it – especially with the sniper rifle – it just wasn’t fun for me.
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