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Mass Effect was one of the first games I purchased for my Xbox 360. It had great game-play, a truly wonderful story, and the characters were very well developed. It also had some terribly repetitive and uninteresting side-missions, and unfortunately, whenever I had friends over to show them this great game, I was showing them the boring side-missions. So when Bioware announced that Mass Effect 2 was on the way, all my buddies just blew it aside. Boy are they missing out, because Mass Effect 2 improved on every single asepect over the original. This game absolutely blew my mind. In fact, I don’t even know if I have a single thing to say bad about it. If you are like my friends and haven’t yet played the first, check out IGN’s video Mass Effect in 5 Minutes and you’ll be ready to rock and roll!

The first five minutes of the game are f’ing epic! After defeating Saren and Sovereign in the first game, Shepherd is out hunting the remaining Geth in the galaxy when something terrible happens and a series of events leads Shepherd to start working for Cerebrus, a pro-humanity organization that was one of your enemies in the first game. It turns out an ancient race thought to be just a fairy tale called the Collectors, are abducting entire colonies of humans for a now unknown reason. It is later found that the Collectors are in fact working for the Reapers, so it’s up to you to figure out what’s going on, and put a stop to it.

Due to the unfortunate series of events in the beginning, Shepherds first task is to rebuild a new crew consisting of some old and a bunch of totally badass new characters. The story is absolutely the reason to play this game. It hooks you from the start and you’ll actually care about every single character that you run into. The ending series of events are as epic as the first five minutes and the decisions you make towards the end of the game will without a doubt shape the way the events will play out in Mass Effect 3, and for those of you who have already beat this, holy crap, what were we looking at in the closing cinematic! Finally, I don’t know if I just don’t have any game, but I was unable to hook up some lesbian sex this time around, which pissed me off, cause I was trying REALLY hard!

From start to finish, Mass Effect 2 took me 27 hours to complete and that included doing every side quest. I didn’t max out my skills and obtain all of the equipment, but after you beat the game, you are given the option to continue playing or you can restart the game and import the character you just played with to continue to max them out with some additional starting money and apparently some additional powerful bonuses. When you begin the game, you’re able to import your character from the previous Mass Effect or create a new one. It’s pretty cool how Bioware worked this out because if you create a new character, you’re presented with some dialog options that let you set up the key events that would have happened in the previous game, like saying who you sacrificed at Saren’s lab and who you chose to lead the Alliance. This time around, I played the PC version of the game, so I wasn’t able to import my Shepherd.

You are presented with a ton of quests throughout your adventure and you can pretty much tackle them in whatever order you want, because like the first game, the missions scale in difficulty with your level. Like the first game, you’ll level up as you finish missions which in turn lets you define the skills your character and their squad will utilize. If you earn the loyalty of your squad mates, you’ll unlock powerful new skills for them to wreak havoc with. Along the same lines, the boring and repetitious side-missions have been replaced with much more involved optional stories that gain the loyalty of your squad mates, which is a HUGE improvement over the first game.

Mass Effect 2 brings you a 50/50 blend of story and dialog, and epic third person combat. Improvements have been made to the combat system specifically in the quality of the AI. Much less seldom than the first game did I even need to issue commands to them; they were always firing off their special abilities and shooting the proper targets. To issue commands, you’re presented with a menu similar to the first game and Dragon Age: Origins, which means that often in combat, you’ll be “pausing” the game to fire special abilities.

The inventory management system has been drastically improved upon as well. Managing your weapons, armor and equipment in the original was a pain in the ass. This time around you’ll find upgrades to your weapons and research components that you bring back to your ship to modify your gear. You’ll need to scan various planet surfaces to obtain the components necessary to upgrade your gear, which can get slightly repetitive after a while, but it’s totally worth it because the upgraded gear can turn the tide of battle in your favor. Before each mission you get to select the weapon load-outs of Shepherd and your crew, and in the Normandy you have the ability to set up which pieces of armor you want to wear. The new system is dramatically easier which really lets you concentrate on the great story.

While you hunt the Collectors across the galaxy, Shepherd will have to hack doors, safes and terminals in the form of mini-games which I found pretty clever. You’ll even get a chance to blast a few space rats if you make your way to the Krogan home-world. Finally, in addition to the paragon and renegade options in the dialog, you’ll have the option to press a button at key times to execute paragon and renegade actions during these sequences which greatly affect how the rest of the events are going to play out, and usually the renegade actions are pretty awesome!

If you haven’t noticed by now, the graphics are amazing. You’re watching the PC version maxed out, but if you’d like to see a bunch more organized game-play clips, check out my other channel, ZeitgeistOther. The cut-scenes are always rendered with the in-game engine and they will reflect which characters are with you and what weapons and gear you’re currently wearing. I also found a lot of other sci-fi influences throughout the game. Illium is just like Star Wars’ Coruscant and the Geth are just like Star Trek’s Borg, spouting phrases like “We are Geth” and speaking of themselves as a collective.

The soundtrack that accompanies your amazing adventure is truly epic but the real star of the audio show is the voice acting. Over 90 voice actors including Seth Green, Carrie-Anne Moss and Martin Sheen, play 546 different characters with over 31,000 lines of dialog. The days of reading massive amounts of text in an RPG are over! Often as you walk around the spaceports you’ll overhear some pretty raunchy conversations usually dealing with drugs, smuggling and inter-species sex. Hell yea!

What can I say besides Mass Effect 2 was amazing! If skipping work to play this game all day was an option, you bet your ass I would have been all over that!. All in all, the game-play is much more fun than the first game. There are no repetitious sidequests, the graphics have taken a step up, the story is truly immersive and I really cared about every single character. What’s great is that you can play your character however you want. In terms of Dungeons and Dragons alignments, I’d have to say my Shepherd was Chaotic Good. I always do the right thing and am for the most part compassionate, but I do it my way, whether or not the law agrees with it. How will you play your Shepherd? Let me know below!