Blast From the Past: Mass Effect 2 Sucks

  (Note: I dug this up from an old Bioware message board.  I originally wanted to include it with my classic, critically acclaimed essay, Beating a Dead Shepard: The Mass Effect 3 Ending Sucks, but couldn't find it at the time.  Without further ado, enjoy this look into gaming's past, first posted in 2010, directly after I fininshed Mass Effect 2.)

most likely contains spoilers)

Great game, but there are so many issues here:

- The Main Story: or lack thereof. The main quest seems so small scale compared to the first game that it feels like it could have been a side quest or at best an expansion. A few human colonies are getting wiped out on the fringes of the galaxy that aren't protected by the human military. How is this a step up from all life being threatened to be wiped out by ancient sentient machines? On the flip side I understand Bioware got all sorts of praise for the crew member side quests in ME1, but turning what should be optional content into the main focus of the game dilutes the emotional impact and just seems lazy.

Where's the mystery, the twists, the shock and awe of the big picture falling into place? The first game had quite a few of these moments, but they are sorely lacking in the sequel. Everything is more or less layed out from the get go and it's a straight path through to the end. Cerberus wants you to build a team, go through the Omega 4 relay and stop the collectors. That's pretty much all you do with very few curveballs thrown in there. No matter how many times I played the first Mass Effect learning what the Reapers really were, making the decision on wether to let Wrex live or die, and of course the entire last section from the battle at Illos spilling over to the partially destroyed Citadel always got my blood pumping. There's really no analog here, just a couple decent side quests.

- The Climax: The final battle isn't bad. The end boss is visually exciting, but it felt like I had already done everything leading up to it not very long ago. Probably because I did. The last mission is just too visually similar to the second to last mission. I go from fighting collectors on a collector ship to fighting more collectors on a bigger collector ship. Yay.

Picking who fills what role during the last battle was a good concept, but the implementation is too shallow. I get pulled out of the fight to look at a static screen with a list of available teammates and there is such a black and white, right or wrong choice attitude to the whole thing it might as well have been a multiple choice pop quiz to see if I'd been taking notes on my teammates skills and abilities. I just spent ninety percent of the game completing quests for these guys, I think I have a handle on who does what. Add to this the fact that I don't really get to see how most of them do during the fight and I'd consider this a complete failure.

- Not My Shepard: As far as I'm concerned, once the Normandy gets destroyed in the opening sequence Commander Shepard from Mass Effect 1 is dead. I don't know if this was an intentional "rebirth by fire" by BioWare or not, but this is another good idea that just doesn't live up to the hype. My level 60 Vanguard from ME1 was an unstoppable badass that could take on entire Geth armies with his fists. I think Cerberus forgot to scrape up his balls from the Normandy crash site.

Carrying over all of the choices I made from the first game was cool and all, but it seems it is all for nothing if the main character I poured literally hundreds of hours into can barely hold his own against a couple Vorcha. He may look the same (better even), but even with his level maxed out he's just a shadow of the character I made. The whole "you're dead. Now you're back!" feels like a cheap cop out by BioWare to oversimplify the character rather than come up with a way to balance the game for higher level players.

ME2's reanimated Shepard falls somewhere between Spider-Man's clone and Star Wars: The Clone Wars in terms of lame concepts.

The problem with cutting out many of the RPG elements and relying on player skill is I'm ceasing to "play" the character of Shepard. With none of my skills carrying over from the first game and such a limited skill tree in the new one, once I get into the actual combat (improved as it may be) I've lost my "ownership" of my character. Now you could almost cut and paste Marcus Fenix or Master Chief over the character and get the same result.

- Mission Structure: Just doesn't cut it for me. The entire game feels like it's on rails. It no longer creates the illusion of having this open world sandbox of an entire galaxy to explore, it's like I'm being shoehorned into doing A, B, and C because the developers want me to do it that way not because I want to do it in that order. Upgrade X is useless without upgrade Y, which you'll need to spend thirty minutes in the boring-ass mining minigame to even use, which is going to be pointless anyway until you have the credits to pay for it.

I can't go off picking random fights with enemies I know are stronger than me and expect to get rewarded with a good chunk of XP because it's all controlled by a strict level cap and XP is doled out in such absolute terms. I miss gaining experience from just exploring the world around me and striking up conversations with random people. Diving deep in the content of ME2 is it's own reward I guess, but again having that knowledge and experience be reflected on my character works on another, deeper level.

"Mission Complete" has to go. I get the feeling I'm playing Doom 3 or something.

- Loyalty Quests:  I touched on it before, but they feel too forced and they get repetitive and predictable.  Why does every crewmate have exactly one thing they need to take care of before they embark on the suicide mission?  It would have been nice if a few of them had follow up missions to further flesh out the character, or if some of them had none at all.  Does Shepard really need to convince Tali and Garrus to follow him after all they've been through?  Most of the surviving cast should have dropped what they were doing and followed Shepard into hell as far as I was concerned, and I found myself disliking the ones who didn't.

Even better, there should have been a few crew members that just flatout didn't care if they lived or died.  Even with a handful of supposed badasses present, the story gets bogged down in teary eyed family issues.  Give at least one crazy bastard who's rough enough to be self-motivated and ruthless.  Just to mix things up.

- Human Aliens: What's the point of having built this great, fully realized science fiction universe with layer after layer of backstory for each alien species if now they're all just going to act like humans anyway? Every faction in this game has been outright blatantly overhumanized, even the freaking Geth! I don't feel the difference in the different species tone of voice or attitude, it all had to be spoken and explained in detail. Not good.

The only species not given human emotions is the collectors, which makes the whole conflict with them not as engaging as the fight with Saren. He was a dark, flawed, but believable and relatable character I cared about. The hive mind of the collectors is a cardboard cutout that seems like it could have starred in a made for Sci-Fi movie.

For a sequel that was billed as "darker, bleaker" there sure is a hell of a lot less racism going around. It's like in the two years Shepard was gone there was a non-stop intergalactic orgy and everyone decided they love each other after all. Or maybe the Obama election had bigger consequenses than we could have predicted.

Planet Scanning: Sucks. The minigame itself is boring, and by the end of my first playthrough I had way more resources than I could use, but not enough credits to buy a few upgrades I was missing. Why can't I sell the excess resources somewhere? It felt like six hours of my life completely wasted. The mako had it's problems, but it wasn't nearly as crappy as this. Feels like another cheap cop out on BioWare's part.

Skill Tree: Also sucks. It's been oversimplified to the point of being useless. Only a couple powers are worth using per class, and spending points in each skill is almost negligible. You're basically just adding small percentages to damage/duration, with the evolutions being a predictable "either add more damage, or get a wider range" for most powers. Again, I felt like I was taking a step backward here: my character at the end of the game should have been my character at the beginning, and Cerberus just should have let me rot at the start if I was going to be such a useless ****.

After the awesome, incredibly deep and nuanced skill tree from Dragon Age, this is like a big FU from Bioware.

Thermal Clips: Plain bad idea. The shield/health system from ME1 felt a little borrowed from Halo obviously (what's new?), but the unlimited ammo and overheating weapons felt like a natural evolution for the genre and certainly felt like it belonged in the game universe. There were even Codex entries about why ammo was not an issue, and it made sense and led to a tighter and more intense combat experience. Casual shooter fans might feel more at home not worrying about the overheating rate of their assault rifles, but the tradeoff of scouring the landscape for clips and not being able to build a customized, unstoppable weapon is not a contest in the least.

This feels like an excuse to pigeonhole the player again, forcing him/her to purchase ammo upgrades to create the illusion of building a more capable character instead of actually letting them build their own Shepard as they seem fit.

Weapons/Armor: - Lacking. It shouldn't even have to be said. The inventory from the first game might have been a bit daunting at first and could have been streamlined a bit, but once you got the hang of it it wasn't particularly bad and offered so many options it was well worth the learning curve. Fourteen weapons? Really? Cheap. And I only found one heavy weapon that was worth the ammo, everything else was useless eye candy.

General Combat: Certainly improved, but not perfect. The lack of a crouch button is baffling, especially considering for some reason the radar is mapped to both sticks. Teammates can crouch if you aim your gun at them, so this leads me to believe the devs just ran out of time. Hopefully it gets fixed in a patch.

The lack of a crouch button makes not using cover in a fight extremely difficult, and the cover system still has some issues. Sometimes you appear to be completely safe but for no apparent reason you'll still get hit or vice versa. Enemies have powers and weapons that can blast you out of cover, which would be fine except the stun they cause along with the resulting camera shake and red screen distortion make it difficult to find or tell if you've found cover afterward. Even then, there were too many times when I made to safety only to have Shepard jump a wall for no apparent reason and get killed.

Also, some of the biotic powers aren't worth the effort on the higher difficulty levels since they require you to expose yourself for too long to use. Even then it can be too hard to judge wether the attack will be sucessful or not because oftentimes once the pause screen is gone and the projectile or whatever reaches the target they've gone back into cover or it will explode harmlessly off a wall.

The gunplay is basically a Gears of War clone, which is fine, but the ME sequel take a few missteps the GoW sequel made as well. Many of the environments just seem like setpieces and are too large to make the fight seem personal. I found the best strategy was often just to duck down at the first obvious piece of cover and let the enemies come in like lemmings. At that point they take cover and the combat often devolves into whack-a-mole.

Fuel Depots: Stupid. Cerberus spends a fortune to rebuild Shepard, but they can't afford to give him a gas card? And why to I feel like I'm being punished for wanting to explore the galaxy?


Again, good game. Am I overcritical? Maybe, but there was just too much that rubbed me the wrong way and I loved the original game so much that I was literally losing sleep over it. All vented.