Mass Effect 2

Oh crap! I beat this game a week ago and forgot to make a post for it. Anyway, I played Mass Effect early this year and despite its high praise was rather unimpressed. The create-your-own story was interesting, but the combat was dull, the vehicle segments sloppy, and no matter how fun it was choosing random lines from conversations, the plot was pretty trite. Well, Bioware fixed basically everything with Mass Effect 2. The combat? Much more fun! I personally loved the sniper rifle, which slowed time for a few seconds every time I looked through the scope- waves of enemies fell to my devastating headshots. The RPG elements worked much better here as well. In the first game I really noticed no difference in gaining a level, but in Mass Effect 2 you could spend experience points on cool new abilities which did indeed come in handy on the battlefield. The crappy driving sections on the Mako in the first game were done away with completely. The plot's no longer a generic "save the universe as captain hero" story, but instead tells a much more interesting tale. Captain Shepard goes down with his ship, the Normandy, at the start of the game, but is saved and kept alive in a comatose state for two years by a terrorist organization from the first game. When the purpose for all this is revealed, Shepard is faced with some tough choices that aren't nearly as black and white as the ones in the original Mass Effect. The plot also unfolds in a much easier way to follow here- a majority of the game consists of finding and gaining the loyalty of 8 new crew members. For instance, to find one member of your team Shepard starts up a prison riot, breaking a powerful woman out of jail, eventually killing the warden. Later on in the game I had the option of helping her face some memories of her past by blowing up the abandoned school/prison where she grew up. There's plenty of variation in the missions- sometimes I never even had to fire a gun to complete the job. It kept me interested throughout the entire game, and unlike a lot of the games I've logged, I really never got bored. Oh, all this time talking about the gameplay and I haven't mentioned that the game is freakin gorgeous. Really my only gripe about the game is that the few loading screens can take a little while to finish. Other than that Mass Effect 2 was a fantastic game, and highly recommended. Just be sure to play the first one, even though it's worse, to get the full story.