The heavy instancing of the game is not helping either and the exaggerated number of loading screens break the flow, cripple the pacing and drastically reduce the possibility of an immersive experience. I could have accepted them if they were leading to wide open areas brimming with detail, but having loading screens when going from one deck to another on a ship I know as the back of my hand is too much. In Mass Effect 1 some of these loading screens were cleverly masked, but it appears that the recipe on which the second installment was build is seriously lacking ingenuity. To keep comparing the two, the concept of big city has been re-approached from a totally different angle. Suffice to say the big cities of Mass Effect 2 are lilliputian versions of their previous self. If you liked roaming in the Citadel and enjoying its beautiful wide open spaces, just forget about it. You will have to accept the fact that now the colossal core of all sentient life feels like a three stories high apartment building with windows overlooking nothing impressive. Enjoy!

Luckily the focus of the main story has been shifted away from the Citadel and onto other cities. For these, what they lack in size they make up for in personality, but this comes to complement once more the general art direction and not the actual gameplay core. Its list of improvements is much more limited. One thing that got my attention was the new curve trajectory feature for certain abilities. In other words you can bypass enemy cover by carefully adjusting the path of your projectile and making it describe a curve midair before reaching its target. Not much in it really, but fun nevertheless. Of course this applies only to Mr. Shepard’s abilities and not to those your team also. For them picking a target and pressing a button is enough to set an enemy on fire or bouncing off the walls even if he/she was safely hidden in a hermetically sealed concrete box and your team members were on another planet, having a drink in a bar. Effective, yes, but also insultingly simple.

Space exploration has been also… modified. I was tempted to write improved, like for many other game elements of Mass Effect 2, but the truth is the good things that somehow found their way into the game are shadowed by many mediocre or simply bad ones that it’s really hard to look on the first as actual improvements. When it comes to exploring the galaxy you can now do this manually. You buy fuel for your ship, you actually travel from one system to another, you scan the entire surface of planets searching for mineral deposits, you launch previously purchased probes to extract these minerals, and so on. What was completely dropped was the surface exploration with the dune buggy. Now if you are looking for the evil dudes’ base to turn it into a pile of rubble on top of which you plant the flag with “Shepard was here!” all you have to do is scan the planet’s surface from orbit, launch a probe on the evil base location and then simply land right on top of it. Fun, but again, not as fun as it used to be. As a side note here, the scanning minigame and actually all the other minigames present in the game are nicely done and perfectly integrated. The Mass Effect series is in my opinion the benchmark for how minigames should look and function.

When it comes to graphics, technically speaking I can’t say there is much improvement from the previous installment and if you compare screenshots from the two games you will see exactly what I mean. But that has no relevance because I have to admit that by using the same elements, Mass Effect 2 has a lot more to offer than its predecessor. There are numerous scenes that will leave you gasping for air, there are also some subtle touches here and there that speak of brilliant art directing. Too bad this is Xbox 360 exclusive and we can’t enjoy it on more potent platforms – save the rage for something else, this is not subject to debate.

Finally, to reopen an old controversial subject: there are some sex scenes in Mass Effect 2. Milder when compared to the ones from the previous installment, but they do exist. Bluntly put: the Normandy is like one big love boat. If it wasn’t for all the shooting, the blood splattered on the walls and aliens falling on their head dead every two seconds, you could take the game as porn simulator. Imagine this: some of the females do not even have their faces covered and there are conversations including words such as sex or skin! It’s outrageous! If they don’t ban the game for violence they should ban it for exaggerated sexual content. Protect our children’s minds from the corrupted imagination of the game developers. Protect them from the truth! The end is nigh! If irony eluded you then I am surprised you know how to read…

In our charts Mass Effect 2 scored impressive marks on the artistic impression. From this point of view it has everything you ever wished for. Too bad it’s a game and not a movie and it needs more than slick looks, smart lines and cool acting to make it in the big league. It needs a quality gameplay core heavy enough to make all the other elements orbit around it effortlessly. Unfortunately the EA-BioWare team dropped a lot of the good stuff from the previous game, simplified many other elements and released a pop corn game that has enough substance to fit in a tiny nutshell. Sure, a lot of the original game’s flavor is still there, but if this is the new direction BioWare is following I fear the day Mass Effect 3 will be released. I prefer to believe this was actually not Mass Effect 2, but Mass Effect 1.5 – public test version. I am still patiently waiting for Mass Effect 2.