A Positive Outlook
Feb. 2nd, 2010 07:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
4thofelevenRealised I might have been a wee bit negative in my review of Mass Effect 2, so I thought I’d balance it out with some nicer comments. I'm liking it a bit more now I've had time to reflect on it - it's not as good as the first game, but it is a solid sequel.
Mainly, I think my dislike comes down to a rather visceral hatred of Section 31 style plots that tend to hinge on the idea that governments and open societies don’t work to solve problems, you need Hard Men to make the Hard Decisions who are unaccountable to anyone. The Spectres in Mass Effect 1 had a little of that, but Cerberus is nothing but that. On the other hand, if you stick to your guns and follow the Paragon path, you can rather satisfyingly tell the Illusive Man to shove it, and that his secret group can’t be trusted with humanity’s future. I’m wondering if, to a degree, the game intentionally made it impossible to talk back to Cerberus too much so that the ending would be just that much more satisfying.
(Oddly, if you read the entry on Cerberus in the in-game codex, they are described purely as a terrorist organization, and it's emphasized that they target humans as much as anyone else. I'm thinking maybe BioWare came up with a cool plot ("You're forced to work with the bad guys!"), then realised they'd have to tone down Cerberus extensively to make it at all plausible...)
What I liked – characters are more detailed (Tali and Liara in Mass Effect 1 didn’t have much to say that wasn’t in the codex entry for their species.), and there’s a lot of extra dialogue and little hidden things. The game kept up Mass Effect 1’s style of giving even the non-companion crewmembers a fair amount of personality; Joker has something to say after almost every mission, and Dr. Chakwas and your yeoman have a fair amount of dialogue too.
The missions aren’t quite as memorable as in the first game, but that’s mainly because they’re shorter – and there’s a couple that can be resolved through means other than ‘shoot everyone’, which is a nice change of pace. I particularly liked the Asari Justicar’s mission, where you have to serve as the decoy to lure a murderer into a trap.
Having shorter missions actually made the game harder to put down – they’re like popcorn, you keep thinking “Well, they’re not too long, I’ll just do one more loyalty mission before I stop…”
Forgot to mention the new 'conversation interupt' system - having a high Paragon or Renegade score gives you extra persuade/intimidate options in dialogue, but also every now and then lets you interupt a cutscene and take a special action - Renegade actions tend to be things like shooting bad guys at point blank range while they're in the middle of an evil rant, while Paragon actions tend to be things like grabbing guns off people before they do something they'll regret, pushing people out the way of bullets, and in one particularly heart-warming example, giving a companion a hug!
Oh, and getting emails from various characters from the first game was a cute way of filling you in on what’s going on since then. And sometimes you get spam – amusingly, because in RPGs one’s so used to receiving random requests for aid from random people, I initially didn’t realise the 419 style scam was a joke, not the beginning of a new quest...
Just finishing off, a couple of screenshots I took of my Commander Shepard:
Shepard and Garrus, with cute matching eyepieces. Didn’t use any other helmets, since they obscure Shepard’s face too much, but even if they didn’t, I’d have probably used the visor anyway.
And a rather nice shot of Shepard in civilian dress I took by mistake while trying to get a shot of something completely different. Shame there weren’t more unarmoured choices, but I did like this outfit as relaxed wear.
Mainly, I think my dislike comes down to a rather visceral hatred of Section 31 style plots that tend to hinge on the idea that governments and open societies don’t work to solve problems, you need Hard Men to make the Hard Decisions who are unaccountable to anyone. The Spectres in Mass Effect 1 had a little of that, but Cerberus is nothing but that. On the other hand, if you stick to your guns and follow the Paragon path, you can rather satisfyingly tell the Illusive Man to shove it, and that his secret group can’t be trusted with humanity’s future. I’m wondering if, to a degree, the game intentionally made it impossible to talk back to Cerberus too much so that the ending would be just that much more satisfying.
(Oddly, if you read the entry on Cerberus in the in-game codex, they are described purely as a terrorist organization, and it's emphasized that they target humans as much as anyone else. I'm thinking maybe BioWare came up with a cool plot ("You're forced to work with the bad guys!"), then realised they'd have to tone down Cerberus extensively to make it at all plausible...)
What I liked – characters are more detailed (Tali and Liara in Mass Effect 1 didn’t have much to say that wasn’t in the codex entry for their species.), and there’s a lot of extra dialogue and little hidden things. The game kept up Mass Effect 1’s style of giving even the non-companion crewmembers a fair amount of personality; Joker has something to say after almost every mission, and Dr. Chakwas and your yeoman have a fair amount of dialogue too.
The missions aren’t quite as memorable as in the first game, but that’s mainly because they’re shorter – and there’s a couple that can be resolved through means other than ‘shoot everyone’, which is a nice change of pace. I particularly liked the Asari Justicar’s mission, where you have to serve as the decoy to lure a murderer into a trap.
Having shorter missions actually made the game harder to put down – they’re like popcorn, you keep thinking “Well, they’re not too long, I’ll just do one more loyalty mission before I stop…”
Forgot to mention the new 'conversation interupt' system - having a high Paragon or Renegade score gives you extra persuade/intimidate options in dialogue, but also every now and then lets you interupt a cutscene and take a special action - Renegade actions tend to be things like shooting bad guys at point blank range while they're in the middle of an evil rant, while Paragon actions tend to be things like grabbing guns off people before they do something they'll regret, pushing people out the way of bullets, and in one particularly heart-warming example, giving a companion a hug!
Oh, and getting emails from various characters from the first game was a cute way of filling you in on what’s going on since then. And sometimes you get spam – amusingly, because in RPGs one’s so used to receiving random requests for aid from random people, I initially didn’t realise the 419 style scam was a joke, not the beginning of a new quest...
Just finishing off, a couple of screenshots I took of my Commander Shepard:
Shepard and Garrus, with cute matching eyepieces. Didn’t use any other helmets, since they obscure Shepard’s face too much, but even if they didn’t, I’d have probably used the visor anyway.
And a rather nice shot of Shepard in civilian dress I took by mistake while trying to get a shot of something completely different. Shame there weren’t more unarmoured choices, but I did like this outfit as relaxed wear.