Mass Effect 2

So, finished Mass Effect 2.  Right from the beginning it is a much, much better game than the first one.  It has a pretty awesome cinematic beginning, followed by a pretty good opening mission.  The combat is a vast improvement, the graphics and level design are a lot more detailed.  The controls aren’t a complete dumpster fire.  I mean, you can actually utilize cover without having to bash the cover button 73 times before giving up and just charging in guns blazing like in the first game.  The camera controls actually work correctly, and there’s no horrible vehicle or even worse vehicle combat.  Shepard has a lot more personality this time around.  Although, I think that might be due to my dialog choices.  The first game I played straight paragon, and holy crap was paragon Shepard boring.  This time I played straight renegade and I had a heck of a lot more fun with it being evil and ruthless.

But with all of the improvements over the first game, I still found myself a bit disappointed by it.  I suppose that’s what I get for listening to everyone tell he how great this game is, and how it’s the best thing Bioware has ever made, and blah blah blah.  There are 4 story missions.  4.  That’s it.  4.  And they’re all pretty short too, ranging from 30-45 mins each.  What do you do for the rest of the game?  Well, you go gather characters, survey planets for resources, upgrade your ship, and then you go spend a good 20 hours of the game playing psychiatrist to all of your peeps.  Some of them are pretty good.  I quite enjoyed Kasumi, Jack, Tali and Mordin’s.  I think the best part of the game wasn’t even originally part of the game.  The Liara DLC was probably my favorite story of the entire game.  It has a lot of cinematic chases and fights, and tells a great story.  Why couldn’t the rest of the game have been like that?  But most of them range from mediocre to adequate.  The problem with this game is that it has way, WAY too many characters.  And even though each of them has an introduction mission, and a story mission to earn their loyalty, there’s just so many of them that if you’re not regularly using the characters, they might as well be invisible for the rest of the game.  I don’t know how anyone else does it, but in games where you choose a team from a group of characters for each mission, I tend to find a few favorites, and only use them.  From all that I heard about this game before playing it, I expected this huge epic story, and it wasn’t.  It just felt like I was running around babysitting instead of taking part in a big, epic story.  It wasn’t bad, but I still kind of liked Mass Effect Andromeda more.  My brother about dropped dead when I told him that.  You’d think I’d just murdered his children and pissed on their graves by his reaction.  I’m sorry, I just don’t find running all over the galaxy doing glorified side quests to be very fun or interesting.  In any other game I’d have just skipped a good 30 hours of my 35 hours of gameplay, but I wanted everyone to live at the end.  I’m not much of a side-questy kind of guy. Also, I really, really dislike the leveling up system.  Rather than getting xp from everything you kill, you get a certain amount of xp for each mission, that usually does not equal what you have to do to get it.

So yeah, it was okay, but it doesn’t live up to the hype surrounding it.

Also, I started playing Mass Effect 3 today.  Anyone out there complaining about the character and facial animations in Mass Effect Andromeda, have y’all played Mass Effect 3?  HOLY CRAP!!!  Hypocrisy much?