Every now and then there is a game that comes in the mail that I know is going to be good. From the moment I boot up the console and watch through the credits I know that this is a game that will dominate my next few days or weeks until I finish it. It will capture my attention like few other games and will be my reason for turning on the telly. I’ll obsess over it, meditate on its intricacies, feel the surge of blood lust at its combative moments and revel in the afterglow of finishing it victorious.

Writing reviews for games like this is easy. The words just flow out of my absolute adoration for what the developers have achieved. I’ll praise the controls that seem to be so natural and so intuitive that the game seems to be an extension of me. I’ll laud the stunning graphics as a new benchmark for the genre, marvelling at how the designers could cram so much detail into the game. The story line will be creative and compelling; the work of a genius that will have me guessing to the very end and the characters will be so real they’ll be closer to me than my family.

Indeed my family will wonder where I have gone and what’s this thing that has made me so addicted for hours at a time, I’ll eschew sleep, and  activities that take me away from my game…my GAME, in essence I will develop disturbing anti-social obsessive behaviour.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls Mass Effect 2 is one of those games.

You have to admire the developers Bioware they have come to the Sci Fi RPG well at least three times and have drawn deep and successfully with Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect and now Mass Effect 2. These games are three absolute triumphs in the genre and yet the curious thing is they are not without faults but they all have one important thing in common; accessibility. They are very user friendly for the RPG novice as well as the veteran.

Mass Effect 2 is indeed a big step up from its original. The overly wordiness and the inability to get out of meaningless conversations that were frustrations in Mass Effect have been overcome. The ease of the shooter elements for anybody but a complete novice has now also been overcome. Actually so much so with regard to the shooter elements that an argument could be made it’s more of a shooter with RPG elements than the other way round…and I for one like it like that.

Once again you play Commander Shepard the war hero or survivor of past murderous conflicts. The story begins with a pretty intense intro cut scenes that I don’t think anyone would have guessed at. I’m not going to spoil anything but you will sit back after a few minutes with what you thought would have been a logical following on from the Reapers story in Mass Effect totally turned upside down.

Allow me to say there is still talk of Reapers, those alien machines/entities, charged with killing every biological creature every fifty thousand years. Many of the old combatants and friends return, but there is a whole host of new characters played very well by the likes of Martin Sheen as the Illusive Man (steals every scene he’s in) and Yvonne Strahovski, the female agent from the TV Series Chuck, as Miranda; coming back too is Seth Green as Joker, the pilot on the Normandy.

The mysterious Illusive Man

But I really want to focus on the game play more than anything else and in Mass Effect 2 when you boot it up you will have the option of importing your characters from the original if you so desire. I did and it has an effect on the game play, enough for it to be helpful but don’t feel you miss out too much if you choose to not import the old info, your story starts the same but has slightly different choices initially.

Space is really big, bigger than what you can imagine, bigger than at least the Mass Effect original universe. Yes there are more planets to explore and travel to, more systems to journey to and more Mass relays to speed through. Mass Effect 2’s universe is just bigger, bolder and a lot more interesting. There are more missions to play and then there is the mining or the probing…

To level up many of your weapons or armour or biotics you have to mine for raw materials on the myriad of unexplored planets. You do this by entering into orbit and scanning the planet for raw materials, there are four some rarer than others. Upon registering a find on the scanner you then have to fire a probe onto the planet to gather the material. Scanning did get a bit monotonous after awhile – until the scanner upgrade arrived and then it was super fast and extra probes are easily obtained at any fuel depot.

Fuel depots…are now dotted over the galaxy because a new innovation in traveling in system or out when not using a Mass Relay is that you pilot a teeny tiny Normandy, you need fuel to do that thus the fuel depots and probes are available at the depots so you can rock up to a planet and mine it.

The role playing aspect of Mass Effect 2 I found to be quite subtle in that with many RPG games the choices you make will either make you Santa Claus or Hitler either very good or very evil. But in this game there is some much appreciated fuzziness to your choices so much so that you can be the conflicted hero who struggles with some of your past indiscretions or the Darth Vader type that deep down has some good in you. Moreover some choices available have such an ambiguity about them that it’s hard to distinguish whether it will lead to good or evil.

This grey area allows the characterisation of the protagonist to be a much more complete and ultimately a more fulfilling experience and possibly a bit truer to life. The only thing that irritated me about the RPG side was the mission complete screens summarising the level just done. They just seemed superfluous to the whole design and for the most part served no real purpose except indicating level complete obviously.

If I can get the other minor issues out of the way with a brief mention here they would be some of character movements in conversation can be well a bit odd. What I mean by that is the turning back and forth of a character’s head ad nauseum in some scenes would have been a pain in the neck in real life and that’s an example of the odd glitchy animation that occurred, its not often but enough to be noticed.

The cover system is a tad ponderous when trying to move out of cover or over a wall. In many respects the cover and sprint feature with that 3^rd person ‘doco’ feel is reminiscent of Gears of War although not as frustrating but it’s a result of mapping the cover and sprint function to the same button. It’s something that you get used to along with oddly retro loading screens that can take too long. The loading/resume screen after you have died is also a bit temperamental sometimes resuming at points long passed and sometimes at the begin level point.

But forget that the game is a joy to look at; it is epic in its scope and cinematography. Rightly ambitious in what it tries to do and except for the odd silly side mission it’s a crowning success. I think that something that should be celebrated is the ability that the game has to submerse you into the Mass Effect lore. I lost sleep over Commander Shepard and also Garrus the Turian and Tali the Quarian, yes they are back.

My favourite character was the Salarian, Mordin Solus inventor of the new genophage designed to keep the Krogan population down. He provides fantastic squad support and very funny comic relief in the game. Oddly enough it’s the human squad members; Jacob, Jack and Miranda that I thought were the most alien they seemed very detached and false and I cared about them the least.

Mordon Solus the Salarian

Combat has definitely improved it’s now no longer good enough to just turn up and shoot, combat is much more frenzied. The enemy AI is better marginally and they are also stronger and more varied. The most effective weapons I found were the sniper and assault rifles and heavy weapons; I virtually ignored the shotgun and pistol. The tech abilities are more user ready and friendly and are an essential strategy to combat the bigger harder opponents. The ability to engage your tech abilities outside the real time combat gave a level of control that I appreciated.

As I said earlier the game is much more combat focused and so squad tactics play a big role in progressing especially on the harder levels of game play. The ability to upgrade your character with combat in mind has been improved where the old system of attributing XP points could be onerous the new system is much more simplistic and designed almost solely for the combat.

The old leveling up of social scores has gone to be replaced with a paragon and renegade scoring system based on your game play choices and there is a dynamic interaction system that appears on the screen that gives you the ability to be merciful or merciless by the click of the left or right trigger.

Mass Effect 2 is a big game, too big for any review to fully encapsulate how good and how masterfully it has been designed and how utterly gripping it is to play. With me being more of an action adventure gamer rather than a RPG one I appreciated the slight shift in focus from RPG to shooter yet I was also pleased the game did retain much of its core RPG components clearly it would not be the same if it had not.

In summing up what makes this game a cut above, I very much want to say that the last concluding hour of the game is one of most intense gaming experiences I’ve ever had. Highly charged and thrilling and although it consists of huge chunks of cut scene movies (at their more exciting moments the frame rate lagged appreciatively)  they never made me feel I was not in control. The last hour, there or there abouts was a super payback for completing the game and is truly movie like.

Is it the perfect game? Well for this player and our marking system it is, despite some trifling annoyances. I would struggle to see a more satisfying gaming experience this year given it combines my Sci Fi love and my gaming addiction. Mass Effect 3 will complete the trilogy some time down the road but I hope Bioware take their time because I also need to take some time to savour this triumph.