Following up on my previous post, I want to talk about Mass Effect 2 this time. The game came out some time after the first one, enough time that I had partially forgot about these games the first time it came out. It promised to continue the epic tale, although the scope seemed a bit less epic from the description.
The game said that now you worked for Cerberus, a racist organization in the first game that performed dubious research and were bad guys, focused in humanity first and fuck the aliens, basically. And that your mission was to attack a base used by a race called "Collectors" that were kidnapping humans. When stated like that, this game seemed initially a downgrade from the first one.
Therefore, it was a big surprise to see the game ended up being awesome. I'd say, overall, it's better than the 3rd game. The 3rd game requires another post, of course, but let's say that, without DLC, it has several screw-ups that made it inferior. With DLC this is compensated, but that's "cheating". ME2 is really really good since the start, with no extras.
The game is basically a "heist" story, with the heist being the attack I mentioned. To succeed you must find a group of people willing to help you and you need to gain their trust. Some characters repeat from the previous game, although there's plenty of new ones. You work with the white supremacist organization but they give you free reign about what to do and you can put distance with them, and there's a lot of character development, for you and for your partners.
Graphics are still awesome, slightly improved from the first game. Gameplay is similar, but with a lot more action: the power system has been remade, and biotics especially have been improved and are pretty awesome now, more dynamic, you can keep using them instead of a weapon.The weapons have been changed, and they've backtracked on the idea of having no ammo, and now they do have ammo, which I think it's a downgrade and makes no sense story-wise, but it may be true that it accelerates combat if you compare it with the previous game. Enemies are a bit more varied and there's less feeling of padding or combat repetition, although some sections do feel a bit elongated.
What has been developed a lot are the side missions. You no longer explore deserted little squares with the same 3 interiors copy-and-pasted, now you don't really explore with a vehicle but you do missions, each with their layout, their objectives and goals. This feels fresh, interesting and does not seem repetitive at all, and the game gets really better from it. The resources mechanics, where you scan planets for resources, is still a bit tedious but in no time and just checking the ones around you as you do side missions you can get all you need.
The game now mostly consists of recruitment missions, where you find a new crew member, and then if you interact enough with them, crew members also give you loyalty missions, missions that guarantee their loyalty to you. All of this is purely optional actually because from the start or at any point, you can try and trigger the suicide "heist" mission, but if you don't have enough ship reinforcements, the right crew and the right equipment, the mission will fail. As you recruit members, there's a few special missions that let you gather extra information that you'll need to at least be able to start the suicide mission without failing immediately, and after these are completed you're free to try and do it, but if you don't have everyone's loyalty, people will die, and sometimes it won't be the person not loyal the one that dies.
That means that what makes sense is to delay the mission as much as possible while you make sure your whole crew is loyal and happy, while at the same time not delaying it too much after a certain event that happens after the third special mission. Some of them are tricky to convince, because certain pairs will fight each other and you need high diplomacy/intimidation stats to make them both happy, and the same apply to some loyalty missions where you need to do some convincing, but nothing crazy if you've been consistently trying to increase one particular stat of these two.
Where the game shines is in the fact that you interact with all your crew members, establish a relationship, get to know each other and befriend them. This game is basically a huge character development plot for all your team members, and it's brilliant to see and experience. This is a strong character-driven story, and their diverse stories are original and interesting, and they make you wanna try and help everyone. After you've developed relationships with all of them, friendly or romantically if you romance one of them (you can only romance one person), you want to keep everyone alive, and then you try extra hard for the final mission.
The final mission is also a very bright moment for the game. It's epic, it's big, and it's made in such a way that there's a lot of possible outcome combinations. Some characters may die, and you need to select the right people for the right tasks to avoid it. If you mess it up enough, you may also die while still completing the game, which is a pretty awesome thing, although it's a "bad" ending. The level of care about your previous choices and options is amazing and I've never seen anything like this in other games that mention that all your choices matter, since in other games it's more common that this is not true at all (and I'm including ME3 in this list, which makes the case of ME3 all the more annoying, because they did do it well in ME2).
This time I played with a female renegade vanguard Shepard, and I have to tell, it felt amazing and awesome to launch enemies left and right with biotics, or to dash towards them and hitting them hard to then shot them with a shotgun, and being able to be sarcastic and foul-mouthed and just a lot more aggressive than what I used to do the first time I played. I still don't like to be mean in such games and I tried to be quite gentle with the crew, they were friends after all, but it was liberating to play a female character like this, and I totally recommend the experience.
