Mass Effect 2, play notes

[cyphomandra]

I've been playing this for 40 hours so far, according to the helpful save data screen (for reference, I have just completed the Shadowbroker mission, and I've recruited Mordin, Kasumi, Garrus, Jack, Thane and Samara, with Miranda and Kasumi's loyalty missions done). For a while, before I did the Horizon mission, nobody seemed to want to talk to me, and I was running out of things to do, other than brooding over planets that were once again far too rich in iridium and lacking in anything else; now, everyone has a personal problem that they need to discuss with me, planets that need investigating keep popping up, dramatic tension is building with regard to the big story arc, and I end up hiding in my cabin and contemplating my space hamster (very soothing. No option for naming it, tho', or feeding it , which is a bit worrying given that I do get to feed the fish, but at least even if I can't ask it about upgrades it doesn't then beg me to go track down yet another significant creature from its past)

So. I'm enjoying the game, and this is as much a prompt for my future recollections as it is a review – in fact, probably more so. I am playing as a Sentinel, mostly Paragon-ish, although I will occasionally pick the Renegade dialogue option if it flows better with the rest of the conversation, and I did use a Renegade interrupt to get a gun off a panicking salarian in a lift on Ilium, plus possibly others before I'd worked out what that flashing thing meant. I have mentioned previously that I suck at console gaming. I am getting better and now spend significantly less time in combat situations staring at the nearest wall while being shot in the back, but I've completely forgotten how to give detailed instructions to my troops, and piloting the Hammerhead was absolute torture (and, in fact, the only time I've actually looked up a walkthrough, because I had finally managed to destroy a tower thingy, but the route I was trying to follow had me falling through polygons sideways on a cliff face (obviously it was the wrong route. It just wasn't obvious at the time) and I couldn't face piloting and shooting all over again. I did much better with the taxi (no guns, no lava, and a nice friendly city to pilot in).

The dialogue wheel is interesting. I haven't played anything like it before, and it took me a bit to get used to how the summary lines matched (or didn't) what you ended up saying. I am still convinced that working through all the dialogue options will result in the character I'm talking to getting annoyed at my persistence (which hasn't happened), and I still prefer the conversation to have some sort of flow to it, rather than have me find out all about their deep inner conflict and then, without even a contemplative hmm, go “What can you tell me about [completely unrelated object]?”. I also tended to miss the interrupts at the beginning, and so now watch cut scenes like a hawk. And still miss them, occasionally, or decide not to use them, but at least I've stopped putting down the controller when the game reaches a cut-scene. I also feel that Paragon Shepherd can be a bit of an interfering busybody, and should possibly consider writing advice columns if she ever acquires any free time.

I really like the gameworld(s), the details and the interfaces, and all the different aliens; I'm particularly fond of the asari, and Ilium, which I could quite happily wander round for longer. I love how many female characters there are (I'm playing Shepherd as female, but even without that there are so many of them). I'm less wild about the fanservice that goes with this - I like Miranda, but there's only so many times I want to see her butt as the main focus of the camera angle - although it's only really annoyed me with Samara (Jack I'm fine with. I just want us to have a mission on an ice planet and have her wear a nice fuzzy sweater with pictures of kittens on it). I have also hit two familiar names from outside the game inside it, which gave me a tiny buzz.

I am feeling that I should be a bit more attached to characters from the previous game (download problems mean I've only just got the supplemental comic for PS3 people and haven't played it), and although I like Miranda and Mordin, I don't really feel all that attached to the other characters yet. I need to get better at using them as team members when we go out on missions, but even then they do feel a bit interchangeable. The Shadowbroker mission had Liara and Miranda interacting, which I liked and made them both feel a bit more real.

Things I haven't liked. Hmm. The Overlord mission, in addition to expecting me to pilot, had some dialogue options at the end that I wasn't happy with, although it should be borne in mind that the final battle took me absolutely ages and multiple attempts, and I was kind of grumpy. Anyway, when you discover that an unscrupulous scientist has been using his autistic mathematical savant brother to interface with alien technology, I had a few ways to express my displeasure about this, but I ended up having to choose a dialogue option that went on about the brother being an innocent. Personally, I am far more concerned about the brother not having consented to this, and I couldn't care less if he was in fact a convicted criminal. This is the most obvious example, but there are other dialogue options that make it clear that even a Paragon Shepherd feels that there are people/aliens that are all right to be killed, and ones that aren't, and I do actually find that a bit difficult to play, not to mention difficult to reconcile to Samara's character (I am also unhappy that the Paragon interrupt for Overlord apparently (missed it again) has you pistol-whipping the scientist because, yeah, that's a way to sort out all those problematic issues of abuse of authority).

The second thing is related, in that it's possibly my thoughts outside the game interfering with the game experience – when going through the plague sections on Omega, you find some looters, and there's a Paragon dialogue option telling them off. Which felt massively hypocritical, given that I am constantly raiding lockers, hacking terminals and taking the last medi-gel from every first aid station I find, and while I'm perfectly okay about doing this in mercenary bases, enemy strongholds etc, that's not always where you are. I found this particularly upsetting on Ilium, where an office has been bombed and you go in to look for someone, because you are opening terminals, salvaging equipment, finding money (from where? Wallets?) etc while the bodies of the workers are lying right there in the rubble. You don't always know whether a hack will get you money or past the next obstacle, so I didn't feel I could ignore all the investigation points, but I declined the chance to hack the public ATM. It creeped me out, and not in a good way.

But. Mostly I really like it, and it's very compelling. It is a lot easier to navigate than any of the Final Fantasies I've been playing, in that it's very hard to get lost or not have a clue what to do next, and there haven't been any particularly difficult puzzles, but my ineptness in battle is quite challenging enough without turning all the room accesses into Myst-type puzzles. I like the mini-missions, and the little bits (ship models, news items, documents etc) that turn the whole thing into a world, and now I am going to see what if there's anything theoretically small and tempting that I can complete before bedtime...