Caltrops - Mass Effect 2





	[quote name="Fortinbras"]It's still an awesome game, but it's a different experience. Mass Effect 2 feels less space opera and more space cowboy. The focus isn't on the clash of interstellar civilizations, but a covert operation against a threat whose significance is really never developed. They're about as scary as Roswell aliens, unfortunately. No epic battle at the end. The final encounter is with something that was introduced less than 5 minutes prior instead of the guy who's been dogging you the entire game. And unfortunately he just isn't as compelling an antagonist as Saren was. He's not given much screentime and you don't get much info about him. But holy shit cliffhanger means Mass Effect 3 is going to be amazing. Also there was a lack of exposition in a couple of scenes, I don't know why but the script writing just feels down a notch from before. Mass Effect 1's scenes flowed really well, I never had a moment of "Wait, what? Why am I going here?". As an example, one of your crew from ME1 is on Horizon when shit goes down and gets paralyzed by some plot-important bug that is used by the Collectors. At the end of the mission, he/she comes up to greet you. It's never explained how they got out of their paralysis. Similarly, there's a part where you have to leave your ship with all your characters in a cramped shuttle while they run some sort of test on the ship. Well surprise surprise something goes wrong that probably could have been prevented if you were there. Never really explained why it was important you leave the ship, just that you were taking your "next mission" (which happens off screen?) These are mistakes I expect from James Cameron, not Drew Karpyshyn. Come on, please, give me any sort of explanation. "We all left the ship and climbed into a shuttle to play soggy biscuit." I don't fucking care, ANYTHING! Also, Mass Effect 2 can force you into pushing ahead the story before you might feel like it, which is something Mass Effect 1 did not do. All in all it feels a bit like they responded too well to some of the criticism. Still, everything else new seems to segue well. Combat feels fast and rewards headshots, but ducking behind cover waiting for my shields to regenerate and vaulting over chest-high walls reminds me a little too much of Gears of War. On the plus side you can punch the shit out of things. The upgrade system is two steps forward, one step back. For instance, the ammunition capacity upgrades are all given to you near the end of the game. Which is great, except at that point you're one-shotting everything so who fucking cares? The first third of the game may make you throw your controller in frustration if you selected a non-weapons heavy class. The extra weapons wielded by the biotic/tech heavy users (specifically the SMG) get handed to you around 2/5ths into the game, after some pretty hard missions (The end of the Horizon Colony mission was particularly frustrating) The story follows the same template of the first one. Intro, Character Round-up, round-up, story mission, story mission, round-up, story mission, story mission. I think they should have shrunk down the list of characters. Having a 3-man squad, when you've got a roster of 12 just sucks. I like to rotate my characters, hear them ramble about stupid shit nobody cares about in the middle of missions, etc. The side-missions are for earners. Nobody sends you e-mails asking you to look into remote planets. If you want to go find trouble on exotic, isolated worlds you have to go looking for it and scan every planet for an anomaly. I guess the problem really is that Mass Effect 2 assumes you are a Mass Effect fanboy or don't give a shit, because the massive conversation trees related to minutiae in every conversation are gone. The Codex only gets about 25 entries instead of however many were originally there. Gone are the days of asking random <a href="http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/mass-effect.php?page=3">cafeteria Asari about their lunch trays</a>. We're past the stage of introducing this backstory-laden world and getting shit done. No time to learn the taxonomy of the Hanar or whatever, you've got people to punch mid-sentence. Also there aren't very many Hanar in this game. AGAIN! For those of you who felt that Mass Effect 1 was TOO LONG, Mass Effect 2 allows you to get straight to fucking business without wandering around the Citadel for an hour. That's one thing I definitely don't miss. You can theoretically get through to the end of the game only losing one person total. How handy that they put in Zaaed as DLC, who is such a bastard I don't mind feeding him to the scripted death point. Also, really pissed that they did the camera shot of Tali taking off her mask just before she jumps your bones from behind. Maybe they could have just put a big black censored bar over her face with big bold letters printed on it: <b>"WE'RE HACKS!"</b>[/quote]