Game Review - Mass Effect 2

First, let me preface this by saying that I was not actually going to buy Mass Effect 2. My nephew, bless his black little heart, probably wanted to know how it was without having to buy it himself (he's the cheapest bastard I know, i mean, seriously, he makes scrooge mcduck look like santa claus), so he tells me "I hear it's nothing like Mas Effect 1."

Well, that's true, I suppose. But that doesn't necessarily mean better. Now keep in mind I've only played a little bit into each game, but the first Mass Effect starts out like this. You get tossed onto a planet with a gun, some armor, and a couple soldiers as backup. I'm going to call them Redshirts, because I can't remember their names, but I am pretty sure they die. So you go through the first mission, you find some armor suits, some guns, and you have to pick and choose what you want to use on yourself and your redshirts. Along the way you meet more powerful allies, ones who don't die like bitches on the first hit, and they become your allies through the whole game. I would assume you collect guns and armor throughout all of Mass Effect one, but here's the problem I ran into. After the first few missions, the whole game is just running around. I don't even mean running around killing stuff, I mean, you run across the map to talk to this guy. He says, go talk to this other guy. You run across the map back to where you were, and it's the guy in the next shop. Then you run... well, anyway, it's a shitload of running with no fighting. Yea, I know, BO-RING. With a capital BO. And a capital RING too, even. yea. So after the first few missions, now this is even before I got my fancy schmancy little space ship, I got tired of the running around on a space station trying to do the talkie talkie touchy feely missions and uninstalled the stupid thing. If I wanted touchy feely talkie talkie missions, I'd have a girlfriend.

Mass Effect 2 is slightly different. You don't get new armor or weapons. You start with a set of them and that's it. Supposedly you can swap out pieces of armor that you find on missions with different pieces instead of swapping out whole sets, but I haven't run into that yet because I ran into a game design flaw called STUPIDITY. You start out in a system where there's a space station that has your first few missions. Big obvious markers on the space station to let you know, HEY DUMBASS, GO HERE FOR YOUR MISSION. Which, I need, because I'd get lost otherwise. But once you finish that mission.. HEY.... there's no markers. No pointers. No directions. I have no idea where to go next. I mean, I got the name of a planet to go to. But I can't go there because I don't know what system it's in. There's 5 other systems in the nebula you start in. But none of the planets are explored. And i don't even know if there's other nebulas or galaxies to look through, because nothing's been explored. And to do any exploring, you have to actually fly your ship there, orbit the planet, and scan like, every bloody square inch of the damn thing to find anything out about it.

Let me give you a perfect example of what I am talking about. I got this mission to go to this other planet and rescue some operative or other who sent out a distress call. Now, I know the planet name and what system it's in because the mission briefing on it was exceptionally helpful. So i fly to the other system and HOLY SHIT THERE'S A BUNCH OF UNMARKED PLANETS HERE. yea. Wonderful. So while I am trying to figure out if it's even the right system, I fly to a planet and start scanning it. Now keep in mind there's mineral deposits on these planets, and you need to use fuel to get to them and then use up probes to mine the locations you find, 1 probe per location. So while you are scanning every single inch of surface area on a planet the size of jupiter, you get a spike in mineral density. So while you're busy dragging your mouse pointer over the entire surface of jupiter, your little seismometer or sphygmomenaom... some graph will spike and you'll then have to drag your mouse back around to the point you thought you were at looking for the highest density of minerals, and finally you find it, and then you drop a probe (and you can only carry 30 at a time or so). And the probe mines and you get like 50 minerals of a certain type. And there are 4 types. And researching one research project out of dozens of research projects can take tens of thousands of minerals. So needless to say, you'd have to mine the entire universe to finish your research projects. So I'm mining away and I move onto the next planet (which didn't have much in the way of minerals so i moved right on), and a third, and as I am mine the third planet, i notice the name of the planet is the same as the one I am looking for! Not that there was any notification of that, but hey, there it is. So then I have to scan the entire surface of the planet AGAIN to find the beacon that is supposed to let me know where my next mission is. So I finally find it and then take the shuttle down, there's a brief firefight with like 3 guys in a 1-room base, and then it's back to my ship! Whee, isn't this fun.

So there was some additional content that you can download (luckily it was free or I wouldn't have bothered), so I noticed that mission was nearby. I went there, found the planet the usual way (I'm already getting tired of scanning every individual planet for minerals or whatever mission I am on, there's no other way to know if you found it or not), and went to where my original ship from the first game had crashed. So I could collect 20 dog tags. Yep, that was the additional content. Collecting the 20 dogtags was the only mission, there was no fighting, just running around looking for grey dog tags on a frozen blue planet for like half an hour until I found them all. Yippee.

I can tell you are already getting bored just reading this post, so I'll wrap it up. The game is f'in boring. It's no different from the original except that you don't get as much character customization with different weapons and armor. So it's even MORE boring. The brief firefights can be fun, but since they are usually over in seconds and you only end up facing 2 or 3 opponents at a time (and you have several allies with you at all tiems) they don't last long nor are they particularly difficult at any setting. And once I finished the starting missions and the ones I could find, I was lost. All I had on my next mission was a planet name to go on, not which system nor which galaxy to look in, and if you know anything about galaxies, you know how hard it would be to find one small point on one small planet in one huge system in one huge galaxy. So that's when I quit. I admit it, I am a quitter. Challenges do not entice me, FUN does. This game wasn't fun. If you like running around, talking to random people once in a great while, and rarely shooting a little, mixed in with a whole lot of sheer annoyance, this is your game. If you don't like those things, don't waste your money.

I didn't notice any bugs, so in that aspect, the game seems fairly well put together. But I am never trusting my nephew's opinion on anything ever again. I don't care if we both see a nude beach babe with large bazongas and he says she's got a nice rack, I am going to disagree with him. They are probably fake. I mean, any slut walking around on a beach naked with big boobs is probably going to have had breast enhancement surgery anyway, right? yea, that's what I'm thinking.