Massively effective DLC system

Time is kinda off since I idled often

I don't have much of a thing for sequels. Sure, almost all my favorite books are presented with sequels galore, but books don't really bother with re-creating the entire framing from the ground up. Video game sequels pretty rarely are truly sequels in the film and book sense, often with huge changes to the game experience.

And holy poop does this game change the feel of the first game.

Insert ape based caption here

First things first, the game presents itself in this weird set up as though the antagonists of the second game are in some manner discrete from the first game. This is - no more no less - about as successful a plot element as butter is at successfully battling your frying pan set to max. You see through it instantly and it leaves little spots on the narrative you'd really they rather didn't bother with. But the game constantly talks about this other race as though they're somehow separate from the original game's antagonistic structure. It's really awful and it creates this weird feeling that you're facing an enemy that isn't so much a complex machine empire, but rather a bunch of mental patients who have difficulty deciding which spoon to jam into humanity's collective eyeball. I didn't really like this, and there's this weird subplot where the enemy "General" says your name all the time.

I have no idea why. Maybe I missed it.

Second, the combat system is squarely worse. It took me less time to adapt to it than the first game, since I've played more console babby cover system games since then. That being said, combat is just ... Bad. At the end of the first game I felt confident in what I was doing and had grown accustomed to the heat system. In this game I spammed one ability (Shockwave) while shooting people with which ever random gun I decided I felt like firing. I understand and actually appreciate the desire to make the game more of a shooter, but I think arguing the game is worse because it's more of a shooter is disingenuous.

Mass Effect 2 isn't worse because it's more "shooter". It's worse because it's a bad shooter AND a bad roleplaying game that traded out elements you'd actually see in a good shooter. If I open the gun pane or whatever you want to call it in Crysis 2, it tells me which guns are better. Alpha Protocol had a whole over complex window, and that's probably too far, but giving shooter fans numbers to work with isn't against the genre.  The other shooting elements are slapdash, guns have no feel, enemies appear from weird angles and I never get that satisfying feel when I shoot someone.

I mean at its simplest, ME2 really suffers because I'm shooting people with no solid explanation of which gun is good against what and no solid feeling when bullets hit people.

I can forgive the weaknesses in the plot (the middle chapter always gets the stick) and I can forgive the shooting, since it's really no worse than any RPG combat from my childhood. Yeah FF7's combat system was so deep bro! Herp derp. I can forgive them if the characters are good. And on the most part, they are.

My favorite new character: Miranda. I liked her serious attitude, and her voice actor was good. The last character added to the party was also awesome, but ends up joining the team a little too late to enjoy.  My least favorite character: Miranda's ass. Look, I know games need to be sexually charged because ... Uh, something about how dudes need tits on screen if there isn't violence or something but seriously, her ass is more of a character than half the cast. I mean it has more shading going on than her face and half of the time she's talking the ass puts in an appearance. The weird thing I actually feel considerably more annoyed with this than the blatant "I fuck chicks" in the Witcher. Like sure, you have sex with way more women in the Witcher, but that's mostly over and done with pretty quickly. It's an element of the game you can entirely avoid and has no real impact on the game, beyond making me laugh really hard a couple times. It's just so tongue in cheek I could't take it seriously. Miranda's ass (and the super awkward romance stuff with Tali) come up repeatedly, each time making me shudder a little. That screen shot above? That's from a loyalty mission you need to do in order to unlock Miranda's last power. It could be argue the game mechanically encourages it, and then literally shoves her ass in your face. The Witcher is silly, but this is actually outright creepy.

Just murdered a dude in cold blood. Now, some ass.

I actually botched the romance angles in the game due to misclicking an option in a dialogue tree. Given how creepy the first game's romance scene was, I'm not exactly torn up about missing it. The best thing is I didn't even realize it was relevant. Oddly enough, I eventually fixed the misclick but I guess I broke it or something.

The rest of the cast mostly returns from the first game, minus the Racist Who Dies. Most of them don't join the team, which is fine. They still resolve plot threads from them, which I liked. You also get this awesome Salarian scientist who does good work and kills people. It's hard not to gush about the quality of his voice acting and character. I change my opinion, he's my favorite. He sings!

So the game sells it based on actually getting to know the various characters and acting on their plots. It even has a bit where Seth Green the ship's pilot as played by Seth Green gets to hobble around, crack some jokes and watch other people get brutally murdered. I don't like Seth Green, but I like him here. I can't explain that.

In summary, the game has a sweet singing salarian scientist, steve blum doing an impression of wrex from the first game, worse combat, a weaker plot and largely deeper characterization. It's also a better looking game with lots of pretty vistas and less barren rocks. The game also drops the vehicle sections, which were bad, then re-adds them in DLC. I'm still a little bit blown away by this one: The main complaint about the first game's vehicle stuff is it was boring and you feel like you were driving a shopping cart. In this game, you drive a shopping hovercart and there's jumping puzzles. That's incredible. The gap between the developer who came up with that and reality itself must be tremendous. Seriously: There are jumping puzzles.

I think I enjoyed ME2 more than enough to recommend it, though like most roleplaying games, I have largely no intent to play it again. I archived my saved game and I'll stash it away with the intent to play ME3 after getting a rest from terrible roleplaying shooter hybrid things.