1. I have heard a lot of people describe this as a perfect game, but like Dragon Age: Origins, I really don’t get it. Its a fun game, but far from perfect. Things like excessive load times, extremely boring planet mining, and robotic characters with no emotion bring it down.
2. The graphics are exactly the same as Mass Effect 1, which while not being a bad thing, is not a good thing either. I had exected at least a small improvement, but some of the locations look like they’re taken exactly from the first game.
3. The story feels like they forgot to add a middle. Granted, I haven’t finished the game yet, but so far its a collection of 12 short stories, with nothing to link them all together apart from needing their help with some vague threatening aliens. And considering you can only take 2 people with you at a time, why is it so important you gather a crew so large?
4. The gameplay is fun. They have gotten rid of the horrible inventory system, and really streamlined everything to make the action flow more smoothly.
5. It’s a roleplaying game, but they seem to have forgotten the role play. There are a few instances where they force Sheppard to do things, rather than let you decide to do it yourself. Such as, instead of saying “Hey there’s a serious threat here, what are you going to do about it?”, they say “Oh by the way you just abandoned everything you were doing and flew over to this planet to help these people.” I don’t like having control taken away from me, and I don’t like being told what my character has done, without me deciding to do it myself.
6. The aliens are better designed than the humans. The aliens look fantastic, whereas the human characters look very robotic. They look like animatronic robots you’d see at theme-parks. The only emotion is in their voice, and even then only occasionally. Soem facial expressions would have been nice.
7. The environments are great and varied. Nothing like the first game, where many of the planets would have the exact same layout, over and over and over. So far, in ME2 nothing has been repeated, which I like.
8. I played half the game before I remembered that I forgot to import by game from ME1. After doing that, I realised it really didnt’ change much at all. Occasionally you will meet people from the first game, and they referenced stuff I don’t even remember doing (because ME1 was a while ago). It feels like the whole ‘import your game from ME1′ is just a gimmick that, in the end, had no importance at all.
9. I already mentioned it in #1, but mining is boring and stupid. I miss the way it was in the firt game. Scan a planet, automatically get all the resources from that planet. Now you have to manually search all over the plane for any resources it might have. I am mystified as to why they made it that way. They couldn’t possibly have thought it would be fun. It just seems to random, wierd, and completely and utterly boring.
10. Overall, yes its a fun game, but its nowhere near perfect. But then, what game is?
). The way I see it, I could write a whole series of books about Noah Vale, but unlike fantasy novels, there doesn’t need to be any over-aching storyline. I can just take one story at a time. I’m not sure how long this first story will be, but I’m trying not to worry about it. Quality not quantity, as they say.
