Not Casual

Comment

Thanks to the brilliance of the pre-order procedure of sending out your title a day before the brick and mortar stores can sell it means that I made a last minute switch from what I was going to write about today. Therefore, instead of me revisiting Civilization Revolution, I get to give my initial impressions on Mass Effect 2 [ME2].

The game takes place a couple of years after the ending of the first Mass Effect [ME], and depending on whether you are taking over a ME character or starting from scratch Commander Shepard is in dire straits (no, he’s not singing Brothers in Arms). I’m not spoiling too much to say that Shepard is killed within the opening moments of the game (every game review spoils that part). You then go through a Six Million Dollar Man “We can rebuild him” sequence where you are revived, but Mark Shepard is no longer a level 50? That being said, bringing my character from ME means that I start out at a level 3 rather than the base level 1, and get other in-game-character bonuses to make this worthwhile. I can see the logic in this, as being a level 50 would allow you to race through the game without the facility to level up any further since that is the level cap.

This rebuilding of your character gives you an excuse to tweak any part of your character from the first game so that plot-wise it makes sense to change your character’s facial features, class, traits (Paragon or Renegade) and even make some minor adjustments to some of the decisions you made in ME so that you can play with different outcomes. However, as I mentioned last week, I spent a long time getting Mark Shepard to this point so I wasn’t about to undo all my hard graft (and yes the Mako driving parts were hard graft). Despite a couple of annoyances, I rated ME as a buy so have BioWare refined their fine wine or brewed a bucket of tonic wine out of their classic?

Experience

I should preface this by saying that as the title of this post suggests, this is a First Impressions article and that means I’ve only spent about an hour playing so I can’t do a full review yet, and therefore I will be commenting on parts of the game I have experienced so far. The full review will come when I put in the 30-odd hours to finish it.

The first thing you notice with ME2 that unlike the Microsoft published ME, that it is an EA game. Dragon Age: Origins [DA:O] was BioWare’s first EA game, and much like that title you access any DLC via the in-game EA marketplace and not the Xbox Marketplace. Normally that sort of move sets alarm bells ringing in my head, as one of the reasons why EA games tend to be approached with a level of trepidation is their willingness to monetise any aspect of any game they put out. However, by putting three free pieces of DLC into the game on the week of release much like they did with DA:O they garner themselves a bit of goodwill on that front. Also, having played DA:O I get access to the ME2 version of the Dragon Armour for my character pretty much straight away, and it looks amazing.

The next thing you notice is that combat is different, and I don’t just mean new weapons and different button mapping (it has both of these), but no, it’s really different. When I say different, I mean good different, as that was one of the weakest parts of ME. Shepard no longer has the overheating problem with weapons, and he now snaps to cover at the push of a button similar to Gears of War 2 [GoW2]. You can also now have pinpoint accuracy with your weapons that allow you shoot various body parts of the enemies thrown at you. The enemy Mechs I faced in the first mission would still crawl towards you when you had blown their legs off, which just adds to the experience, and encourages you to go for the headshot to save ammo. Ammo is now something you have to track and that feels far more natural than the overheating gun barrel problem of the first game.

The game looks beautiful too, I mean really stunning for the Xbox 360 and this proves that it’s still a graphical powerhouse when a development team knows what it’s doing. I can only imagine that the PC version looks equally if not more stunning on a high-end graphics card. A simultaneous PC release is also a big departure for the series, and I can imagine a welcome one for the big RPG-loving PC audience out there.

The music is suitably atmospheric with several Vangelis-Blade-Runner/Carpenter-Escape-from-New-York-esque key notes that gives it this futuristic otherworldly quality that really adds to the mood of the adventure. Moodiness being one of the key components of this game, apart from the note about Shepard’s initial fate above, I’m going to stay clear of spoilers. However, what I can say is that BioWare’s assertion that this is the “dark part” or Empire Strikes Back part of the trilogy seems to be true from what I’ve seen (does that mean Mass Effect 3 will have teddy bears throwing rocks at Mechs?). The Commander is now allied with a group that he cleaned up after in the first game, in that they were involved in nefarious experiments into some sort of super-soldier type programs that went wrong and Mark Shepard had to deal with the fallout.

This group now task you with continuing on with the mission you undertook at the end of ME. Whether they turn out to be the misrepresented group from the first game or the real villains remains to be seen? One minor gripe I have with ME2, and it’s purely personal is that the squad I spent 31 hours putting together in ME are now disbanded since you were presumed dead. I’ve encountered one former member, but she was reluctant to tie her fate to my journey once again. From a narrative point of view, the new characters add a nice refreshment to your interactions, but I’d invested a lot of time in my team so I can only hope that our paths will cross once more as the adventure continues.

This trivial criticism aside, we get to the positives; the hacking system has not been overhauled from the ME which as the boys at Penny Arcade noted did seem an odd fit, it has been completely replaced with something closer to the “tubes” system in BioShock. This new mini-game, although still a mini-game feels far more like something genuinely puzzling rather than just an expensive version of Simple Simon. There is also a different hacking mini-game for different types of computer facility, either a circuit board or a streaming screen of data blurbs. They’re not complicated as in each it’s just a case of marking items that match, but it just looks slicker.

The dialogue system has also been improved, and frankly I was quite stunned as this was the one part of ME that was pitch perfect. You now have the facility to interrupt conversations depending on your character traits, Left trigger for a Paragon interruption and right trigger for a Renegade interruption. This makes the sometimes long conversations feel even more interactive rather than just waiting to make your appropriate response from the vast dialogue tree. Whilst we’re talking about conversations, I have to say that adding both Martin Sheen and Yvonne Strahovski (from TV’s Chuck) to the extensive voice cast was a master-stroke, especially since Miss Strahovski’s character looks identical to her except for the hair colour.

Finally I get to set your minds at rest, from what I’ve played so far there is no interminable elevator journeys in ME2. I have been in one elevator, but it’s journey was near instantaneous.

Verdict

I’m only about an hour in, but I can already tell that this is a buy. I know that I’m more than a little biased when it comes to BioWare games, but I would find it hard to believe if even the most casual of RPG or Third-Person-Shooter fan did not get something out of this latest opus. I’ll see you all in 30 hours time…

Tags: bioware, ea, ME2, rpg

Categories: PC, Xbox

Both comments and pings are currently closed.