Mid-Game Review: Mass Effect 2
I am currently about 20 hours into Mass Effect 2. I would have been further but between, work class, and getting new furniture this week, my gaming time has not been where I would like it.
So far, I think Mass Effect 2 improves on the foundation of Mass Effect 1 in every way possible. The action is better, the character interactions are more cinematic, and the monotony has been reduced.
From what I have read, I am just around half way through the game. I am going a bit slow and being a completionist though, so I may take longer than most people will. Some friends of mine have already beat the game and clocked in 30-35 hours. I am expecting to get in 40+ with doing all the side quests.
Gone is the planet exploration with the Mako and the relentless gun and armor drops (that would always just get reduced to omni-gel) and replacing it is a streamlined game. I have seen complaints from people that they think Bioware toned down the RPG and dialed up the shooter parts too much but I could not disagree more. I think this game delivers a perfect balance between shooter and RPG, but this is something I will probably deconstruct more in another post this week.
The best quality of the game is hands down the cinematography. I believe that the directing in this game is a huge step forward for video games as a genre and will go far to show the kind of personality and emotional response that games can invoke. The characters are not just flatly delivering lines, their faces and bodies give the visual cues that real people give.
This was more eloquently described by CharlieFoxtrot on the SomethingAwful forums:
"I might be flaring up the discussion about ME2's writing again, but I thought there were some interesting points brought up earlier. Basically, it boils down to this: complaining that ME2 isn't up to Planescape: Torment's standards is like complaining that that Steven Spielberg can't write novels like J.D. Salinger. They're trying to accomplish two different things.
Because games are still relatively young as form of expression, they have to borrow their narrative grammar from other forms. P:T chose a novelistic style, full of dense prose, reflection, and introspection. Technology has reached a point where ME2 can choose a cinematic style and use the grammar of film. And it does it so, so well.
It's helpful to compare it to Dragon Age, a game made by the same company but also trying to accomplish something slightly different. For all the amazing stuff Dragon Age pulls off, they did not put as much energy into cutscene presentation. The camera angles tend to be flat and workmanlike, purely designed to convey the necessary information, and the world and its characters are not expressive enough to stand alone without little parenthetical descriptions from time to time.
ME2 spends so much energy making the game's presentation as flawless and emotionally charged as possible. It's all composed of the little things, like that you can see Shepard smirk a little after making a one-liner, or that people walk around and shift positions when having a conversation instead of standing perfectly still, or that the characters' eyes are articulated enough that you can follow what they're looking at like an audience does a thousand times when they watch real people in a real movie.
It really hit me in Miranda's loyalty quest, in the scene where she looks at her sister and her family and the camera drifts from over her shoulder and racks focus into the distance, and then it cuts away and has Miranda step away towards the camera so that you can read every nuance of her expression. Any film buff can tell you that that is a cinematic technique to get us closer to a character's perspective and get us to relate to them better. But most game designers either aren't sophisticated enough or don't care enough to make use of techniques like that.
Of course it would all be for naught if that kind of detail didn't carry over through to everything; it would be like the FMV craze of the late nineties where everyone was saying "It's like a movie and you're the star!" when in reality you were playing a discrete gameplay segment, then watching an FMV, then playing the game some more. Everything BioWare has done in ME2 is about streamlining and perfecting -- not just the gameplay but the story as well. The main directive in ME2 seems to be never to break the flow, and to make every part of the game as seamless and immersive as possible. Rejiggering the systems so that you're not shuffling through an inventory screen or a level up screen every few minutes not only streamlines the gameplay, but also prevents as many jarring immersion breaks from the narrative as possible."