Pronounced My-Key-On: by Michael Quach

I finally finished up Mass Effect 2 clocking in at 41 hours and 30 minutes. I have to say, Mass Effect 2 was a big improvement over Mass Effect 1 and I thoroughly enjoyed it more.  The ethical dilemmas had more impact on me and I found myself trying to rationalize what would I do in that situation.

I’ll have to write up my review later on but I have to say, playing through Mass Effect 2 has me starting up a new character on Mass Effect 1 just so that I can play again on #2.

Meet Kaiden, saved part of a colony, learned more about the Collectors. After that, a floodgate of personal missions from the characters pop up. I’ve finished Jacob’s, Jack’s, and that bounty hunter’s missions and now on my way to Illum to get other henchmen and do Miranda’s quest. Picked up Tali and finally got an SMG.

I have my 4 main squad mates. Picked up Jack the convict, and the krogan warlord and now off to battle the collectors. So far, no romance options with the two available females on my crew and my hold is filling up with resources from probing the planets.

I think I’m about 18 hours in so far and just started finding side quests on the planets I’ve explored, I think maybe another 18 hours and I should be done.

Day 1 of my first play through of Mass Effect 2 and I’m still in the same star cluster. I’ve been to Omega station, collected two squademates, investigated a lost colony, and went to the DLC site, Normandy Crash. So far it’s been a pretty fun and engaging game despite some minor gripes I have.

Bioware has improved the shooter part of Mass Effect and the game now include some time sensitive cutscenes that you let interrupt with either Paragon, or Renegade options. The inventory and planet exploration have also been revamped; inventory no longer exists on your character and the only things you can pickup are plot items or decorations that go in your ship. Items you buy from the store are upgrades to your body/squad/weapons and you only get one armor, not including the DLC armors.

The armor you receive is customizable in paint and patterns and will change based on what upgrades you add to it while your henchmen wear the same armor throughout the game and will auto equip the best weapons in your loadout. No need to share weapons or buy multiples of them now as your buddies will get a copy magically and they will never ever run out of ammo clips. Yes, that’s right, ammo clips.

Remember how in the first Mass Effect you had to wait for the heat to dissipate on your weapon if you fire too much in a short time but that was fun because you had unlimited ammo? Not in Mass Effect 2, now everyone carries the state of the art ammo clips that let you immediately flush out the heat with the heatsink ammo clips without having to wait for your gun to cool down. Unfortunately these ammo clips only lasts for so long and are one time use so you must always be on the hunt for more ammo.

Mako exploration of planets has been replaced by a resource scanning/probing minigame. Now you just spend your time holding down a button and scanning a planet grid by grid and slowly turning the planet in order to mine resources that you need to upgrade your weapons, armor, and ship.

In game menus require multiple mouse clicks instead of having to press Spacebar to close the menu and scroll wheel on the mouse is only used for weapon selection. You cannot use your scroll wheel to scroll through the pages of information in menus and instead you must click and hold down on the scroll bar and drag it down.

Oh, and you can’t take your helmet off during cinematics. All that talk about how much facial expressions and the eyes are important in Mass Effect? Hard to see those expressions when you can’t even see your character’s own face. Other NPCs have no problem identifying you though and they don’t seem very surprised to see you considering what happens to you in the first five minutes of the game.

Now onto day 2, I’ll go visit the citadel.