Two seperate reviews by J.D. Cook and Ryan Caso
March 14, 2010
Some Massive Effects
Game Review of Mass Effect 2
By J.D. Cook
Bioware’s Mass Effect 2 has torn through my life like a hurricane. It’s
destroyed my time, exercise, and strained personal relationships, but it was definitely worth it. Unfortunately there were some
minor flaws, and because I have encountered nothing but extremely positive reviews on the internet I think a fairer and truer
review is due to the world so with that in mind I invite you to read the following.
As many video game fans know Mass Effect 2 is the sequel to the popular Mass Effect. In the game you control Commander Sheppard
as he journeys through space attempting to stop an ancient race of machines known as the "reapers" from destroying and enslaving
organic life. The game play is a hybrid between a role playing game and a 3rd person shooter. Now that that explanation is out
of the way I’ll jump to the heart of my review.
Mass Effect 2 suffers from three major flaws that limit it from being as good as the original. The first is that space
exploration is no longer fun at all. One of my favorite things in the original was exploring from planet to planet and driving
over them with the terrestrial vehicle the Majko. Now I’ve heard from some that the Majko was hard to drive, but I think that is
an easy enough thing to fix, and yet instead of doing that the Majko was completely erased from the game. Now instead of landing
on certain planets and driving around doing exploration you are forced to use a tiny scanner to search across the face of a
planet looking for resources and side missions. Not only is it a pain to scan the planets, but in order to find anything on them
you need to send down a probe. This requires you to continue to buy them so that you’ll have them on hand. Otherwise you may
find something but have to journey back to buy probes at a space station.
The second major flaw I encountered in Mass Effect 2 was the storyline itself. This game is all about building a team
to bring on a suicide mission to stop a group working for the Reapers known as the Collectors. Now I like this idea, but it is
essentially a rehashing of the first game except the Collectors have replaced the Geth, a group of machines working for the
reapers in the original game. Then there is an issue of repetitiveness. You must go on a mission to recruit a team member and
then go on another mission to gain that member’s loyalty, and since you have a fairly big crew this gets kind of boring, and it
doesn’t flow as well as the first in which it really felt like you were building a crew through story instead of being forced to
recruit. Speaking of the first game it seems that places and characters from the original were virtually erased. It would have
been cool to go back to some of the locations from the first game instead of visiting all new locales that didn’t impress me as
much as I had hoped. Finally my biggest problem with Mass Effect two’s storyline is that at one point you and your entire
military crew decide to leave your ship, the Normandy to go on a mission. This “mission” is never played out however as your
ship is attacked while you are away. This leads to a fun sequence where you play as the ship’s pilot Joker, but it makes no
sense that Commander Sheppard would take a shuttle with his entire military crew to nowhere and then come back. It’s essentially
a part of the story you really have no control over as Sheppard and that bothers me since the first story is entirely driven by
you.
The third flaw is one that has already been discussed in the news. You can barely read any text in the game on a standard
definition T.V. I had to struggle through the entire game to read my responses and since the game has some much reading in it
this is quite an annoying challenge to overcome. I’m sure this is no problem for the serious gamer who has a specific H.D.T.V.
set up just for games, but for someone like me who rented the game because he loves the story it proves to be quite a problem.
Those three gripes out of the way I will say Mass Effect 2 has an amazing partner AI system in which your allies are a true
blessing. Not to mention it has some really amazing stages. My favorite was a stage in which you enter a ship that was docked
with a dead Reaper only to find the Reaper managed to corrupt and turn the crew into monsters. It rings of the best space horror
films, not to mention Dead Space, which seemed to be a major influence on Mass Effect 2. The game also has some interesting
missions, one has you pretending to be bait for murderer, and another has you following a politician. Overall this game is very
good. I would say it is a solid B+ but it doesn’t quite measure up to the original. I hope the third game does.
March 24, 2010
Counter Arguments
Game Review of Mass Effect 2
By Ryan Caso
After having read J.D. Cook's statement on Mass Effect 2 and why
he feels it is not a perfect game, I put together this argument against what was said. I shall show why one of the changes
mentioned as degrading to the game is a null argument. However, since this will also be my review of the game, I shall also
take the hypocritical stance of why I too feel that the game is not all it has been made out to be with a few extra points.
Galactic Exploration
First of the arguments against Mass Effect 2 was that the galactic exploration aspect of the game was killed or at
least severely wounded in the transition from Mass Effect to Mass Effect 2. The transition from the first to
the second game was a major one in that you no longer roam the planets freely but instead land and do a linear mission. While
this may seem like a large drop from the first game when stated as it is if you were to play both games with a decent amount of
time given to each you see that it is not much different; free roaming on the planets usually lead to a mission that was also
linear.
Now for the complaint against the Mako being removed and replaced with scanning planets and using probes to locate anomalies and
mine resources. This new way of doing things goes rather well with the fact that after Sheppard’s 'death' the Alliance dropped
him. This means that you no longer receive any materials you need from the Alliance and therefore have to look for them
yourself. The scanner and probes are that new method. The 'annoying' scanning is implemented rather well since anything slower
than the scanner before the upgrade would be useless but anything faster and the Xbox-360 controller would make scanning very
difficult in terms of control. Also, the loss of the Mako again makes sense since it is lost when Normandy SV1 is. I would
imagine that it would seem a pointless expense to Sheppard’s new funding source to get a new Mako since all of the operations
will be team assembly and precision drops.
The main difference in the two game’s methods comes in when someone highly preferred being able to use the Mako to cross terrain
and explore. This creates a problem with both arguments now. Am I supposed to tell those who do like using the Mako that they
should not enjoy searching all the side planets in that manner, or should I tell the people that thought that searching each
planet with the Mako was tedious, tiresome, and repetitive that they should like it? From a point of view as where, I thought
searching each specifically was fun but got old, I can say that the new system is what I feel to be a nice merger of the two
extremes. The new methods fit well into the flow of the story and allows for a more varied universe, even if you do not agree
with the new methods in the new system. Also, just because I am like that, it is called the Mako, not the Mako.
Those Simply Awe-inspiring Graphics . . . wait a second, what?
My reasoning behind why the online reviews of Mass Effect 2 seems to be too nice is they all somehow mention the
graphics as being amazing. Now I might just be nit-picking but I cannot go along with this statement at all. These graphics
might have been amazing had the game come out at the same time as Mass Effect but it did not. Bioware has had ample
time to work around in this area seeing as how similar the plots to Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 are. So my
question is why are all the textures so very pixilated? The game has been broken up into multiple load points at which
everything can be brought in with high res textures, why not use them? The environments are vast, beautiful, and full of items
but not enough to make the claim that higher resolution textures would cripple the game play. Many other games have had much
more daunting of scenes and still performed well, if not better.
To make a good comparison I shall use a game that performed a similar move as Mass Effect, even though on a smaller
scale overall. Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 was built on the same engine as the original Modern Warfare. The
map sizes in Modern Warfare 2 campaign are comparable in size to the at-one-time loaded areas in Mass Effect 2
if not just a bit smaller. The graphics in Modern Warfare 2 are what have been considered expected graphics from the
game, marginally leaning to the great sector of the scale. Not a single item in Modern Warfare 2 is pixilated to look
like a JPEG picture that's been saved over and over to the point that you can visibly see the squares from 10 feet away from
your screen.
My Final Assault
This will be just a statement on something that I will not pretend to have experienced. I have not played Mass Effect 2
on a standard definition television, nor do I plan to. My opinion, although possibly controversial, is that those complaining
should just get an HDTV if this is the supposed problem. The argument of price has been all but destroyed now. Since LED TVs
and nVidia’s 3D vision TV technology has come out the standard LCD HDTV has seen a 50% drop in price. They are also experiencing
some extreme sales on some online sites and in stores. Also in this age of technology a decent computer capable of running games
like Mass Effect 2 would cost roughly $(800 ± 200). A small personal 19" LCD HDTV costs about $150, most 42"’ LCD HDTVs
are running from $300-$600 dependent on company or where you buy it. Personally I would recommend Visio or Samsung for anyone
looking. Also, do not be fooled by the HD label. HD is not always HD (now do not get confused please). HD starts at 720p
(since HD refers to the number of pixels on a screen that is over 1 million), but this is different from 'Full HD' which is
typically used in reference to anything that displays in 1080p. Finally, make sure the scanning system is represented with the
letter p, as there is a large difference between 1080p and 1080i, the p stands for progressive which results in a much clearer
image. Happy gaming!
Final Grade of Mass Effect 2:
A – Solid game, fun, good plot continuation.
© 2010 Jeremiah Dylan Cook and Ryan Caso. All rights reserved.
