Have you ever dreamed of saving the galaxy… twice? Well now you can, as the highly anticipated sequel of the famous BioWare RPG is finally out. Two years have passed since Commander Shepard has defended the galaxy from the Reaper threat and saved all organic life from annihilation. Not much has happened since. The newly formed human controlled Council is wasting no effort in burying any Reaper related information and shifting the public’s attention towards the artificially created life form known as the Geth. All inhabitance from some human colonies based in the Terminus Systems are mysteriously disappearing and no one has a clue as to why or how. A new alien race, The Collectors, makes its dramatic stage entry. Oh yes, and there is also the small matter of your death which functions as the main catalyst of the whole sequence of events that hold Mass Effect 2 together.

When it comes to the story and generally speaking about the whole artistic impression, I have to raise my hat and bow before Mass Effect 2 and its creators. Everything from dialogs and voice acting to character design and the actual flow of events is masterfully done and in the same time sufficiently non-intrusive to leave you fully focused on blowing bad guys up if that is the only thing you are interested in. Unlike games such as MGS4 you don’t need a ten day course to break you into the subtleties of game history and character relationships. Having played the first installment opens up some interesting perspectives and adds up the depth of the gameplay experience, but not that much to make the first Mass Effect a mandatory intermediary step. So if you missed the first game and you have the time, I recommend you pick it up and give it a quick walkthrough before moving on the most recent release. But if you don’t have the time or you are simply not in the mood to play a two year old game, then don’t worry about it: Mass Effect 2 is solidly built and can easily stand up on its own.

The wrapping of the game is top quality, but once you dig through it you realize that underneath there is a slightly different thing from what you might expect. One of the first things I noticed about Mass Effect 2 is the disturbingly large amount of features from the previous game that have been reused, sometimes without even the slightest modification. This ranges from basic graphic elements to abilities, skill trees and gameplay mechanics. If it wasn’t for the new story, the new characters and the decent amount of gameplay hours included in the recipe, you could easily mistake Mass Effect 2 for a mere add-on or expansion pack.

If you look at the RPG elements and compare them with the ones in the previous installment you are bound to notice the clear simplification process they went through. The main character development is heavily controlled as the experience points you gain through completing main quests are carefully adjusted so you are always in the level range of the next mission. The side quests also give some experience, but not enough to make a serious impact on the way Shepard “grows up”. The skill trees are just slightly modified including this time a point consumption penalty as you improve the same skill, but also a bonus if the skill is maxed up. So no matter what you do or in what order, the game developers made sure there is no nasty surprise in store for you: throw level up points in the skill trees in whichever way you like since it will have a minimum or absolutely no impact on the difficulty of the upcoming mission.

When it comes to weapons and armor the disappointment is even bigger. In the previous installment you could modify and enhance them with custom parts, having the choice between making a weapon more powerful or more accurate, making it more reliable against certain types of armor or against synthetic enemies, and so on, and the same goes for armor. In Mass Effect 2 this whole customization system has been stripped down to a brain dead version of itself where you can choose one weapon over the other, and even that choice is not actually there since in most cases weapon B is clearly superior to weapon A. To make matters worse, ammo has been reintroduced for all weapons. Instead of having that extremely cool and innovating system from the first Mass Effect where each shot fired generated heat and when the weapon overheated it become unusable for short amount of time, thus replacing reload, this second iteration of the series took a very long trip down memory lane and dug up such an old design element that you can call it medieval and get away with it: ammo. So if you thought that “2” stands for “better” or “improved”, I’m sorry to tell you it’s not the case and the ammo issue is just one of many that prove this point.

Another would be the AI, acronym for artificial idiots when it comes to Mass Effect 2. This applies to both friend and foe. Your team members are build on the general idea that cover is for cowards and one last shot into that swarm of incoming enemies makes a world of difference even if it translates into suicide. Fortunately those enemies took the same training courses and have the same battle awareness as a brain damaged squirrel. On low difficulty levels this can easily slip unnoticed, but once you turn the heat on a bit and the game challenges you to think out of the box, they will stand out like an albino in Harlem. One of the most disturbing flaws is the fact they have their movements limited to certain areas so if you find cover and line of sight out that area they immediately became sitting ducks with big red targets attached to them. Following this idea no less than 80% of the total encounters the game has to offer can be easily exploited. If that doesn’t take the fun out of them, I don’t know what does. Maybe the difficulty curve which seems to have been drawn by en epileptic during a seizure. To give you an idea of how spiky it is: I have spent one hour in a random encounter half way through the game, but the final boss went down during the first attempt. Make no mistake and this needs to be cleared out because all the above might leave you with the wrong conclusion: the combat can be entertaining, it can be a great source of fun. But that only happens if you accept what the game wants you to do and act accordingly: run into fights like a raving lunatic, guns blazing and with no thought on strategy. If you pause, if you take your time and plan ahead, then the whole combat seems rusty and the enemies challenge your patience instead of your shooting or strategy skill.