I finally finished my replay of Mass Effect 1 and really enjoyed it. So naturally I jumped straight into Mass Effect 2, which I absolutely adored when it was new and has long been in my mental top 10 games for a long time.

And fuck me, it suuuuucks. Admittedly I’m only like 3 hours in, but honestly it’s kind of stunlocked me how wrong I was / how much my perspective had changed.

The gameplay is so telegraphed and 101-brown-cover shooter of the era it’s painful. The combat is worse than (the admittedly improved in the Legendary edition) first game, with annoying abstracted difficulty, artificial limitations, and a shit simplified cooldown system for powers that doesn’t feel like you’re a squad but one character in three places. The accuracy is annoyingly imprecise, camera and reticle movement so sway-y it’s motion sickness inducing, and the weapon sounds lack any and all punch or feel.

The RPG elements have been streamlined into near irrelevancy and despite the fact that the locations are richer and fuller visually, the world feels more lifeless because your squadmates don’t really say anything or interact with it. In the first game, at any time you can turn to any squadmate, hit the interact button, and they’ll comment on where you are or what’s happening. Sure they only have a few comments for each place / bit of timeline, but it makes them feel like real characters and the three of you like a real squad. Your choices of who to bring on missions rarely matters, with anyone not key to the mission plots standing silently staring off into space in cutscenes as if they’re bored by the whole thing.

In the first game, it hides loading screens between areas with longer walks through areas that reveal vistas and do dramatic scene setting when you arrive in new locations. Or uses elevator rides as opportunities for unique, often funny or insightful conversations between the different makeups of your squad that flesh out the world and the characters. In this one, everything is just a loading screen, making all the locations, worlds, ships etc feel completely disconnected from each other and often you’re just dumped on a planet with little or no context for it.

Speaking of planets, the galaxy map is a mess and having to prebuy fuel (which doesn’t burn at a predictable or internally logical rate) to travel certain areas of the map really sucks. Get 99.9% of the way to your destination and have the fuel number hit zero, too bad, doesn’t matter if you literally have momentum to carry you the rest of the way, game takes over and flies you all the way back to where you started to refuel. Motherfucker, if I’m totally out of fuel how the fuck are you turning around a spaceship travelling at near light speed and sending it lightyears back the way I came instead of the next ten seconds of flight time with the momentum from previous thrust in the vaccum of space! Yeah, and the surveying and abstracted, multiple resource currency extraction fucking sucks too.

It really is like they stripped back everything that actually added depth to the world, the characters, your choices when building their stats and abilities etc. And then just layered on boring, accountancy bollocks mechanics and internal currencies over the top instead.

The returning to where you started fuel thing might seem like a minor but annoying thing, but it’s unfortunately a symptom of a much much bigger problem. The first one built a unique and interesting universe with a truly amazing amount of lore, politics, internal logic, technological detail, and thematic depth. Honestly is shocking how well and deeply crafted it is right off the bat in the first game. And then the second game repeatedly goes fuck that! in order to make it more like the most generic slop imaginable from the time. Really cool gun technology that is based on a microcosm of the same mass accelerator tech as propelled all these cultures into the cosmos and is a major plot point and part of the lore? Nah, ignore that because we want a generic reload system like other games. A Star Trek/DS9 type thematic throughline about the difficulty but essential need to overcome differences, historical hate/war, and personal issues to succeed and survive? Nah, fuck that, everyone is a cool self-centred libertarian asshole who spends every conversation complaining about red tape and diplomacy and how’s it’s much more fun and cool to just torture dudes or whatever. That evil little splinter group that were constantly fucking up and getting themselves killed by running experiments to breed face-eating-space-leopards? Oh now you work for them, no you don’t get a choice, and they’ve somehow become a massive intergalactic shadow government with more knowledge, technology, and resources than everyone else in the space of two years.

The whole game seems designed to limit your sense of choice, not just being forced to work for Cerberus. There’s a million different upgrades and items to buy, but the economy is artificially tight so you can’t afford to experiment. Same with the inability to easily or cheaply respec your character. Worse still is the Paragon/Renegade ‘morality’ system. For all its faults in the first game it worked thematically and allowed you to approach different situations with different reactions and attitudes. Because special dialogue choices/checks are now wholly tied to these morality points instead of putting stat points into charm/intimidate, the second game basically forces you to pick a binary ‘good’ or ‘bad’ right from the start and then pick those dialogue choices exclusively in order to have enough points to pass said checks. Any contrary choice cancels out previous ones so any nuance leaves you in a limbo where soon you can’t pick either.

And the writing, oh god the writing. Conversations in the dialogue tree often don’t flow at all. Sometimes asking one option before another will inexplicably remove to option to ask the other as a follow up. Other times you can choose multiple options after one another but they give the same info or even exact same voice line anyway. It also has a terrible case of meta-scriptitus. Characters know things they couldn’t know, assert things that go against character, just because it’s needed to advance the plot. The plot that’s also a fucking mess. Even in just the first few hours, if you actually read or listen to some logs & extra dialogue, you realise that the entire plot setup doesn’t make any fucking sense…

spoiler

Cerberus rescued your corpse and spent two years rebuilding you after the destruction of the Normandy by the collectors. But the scientific project to do so started years before that? So they knew that you’d randomly be blown up by a ship from a race that they don’t even know exist until you discover that they do, for them, later in the game?!?

Just nonsense. I could go on, but like with the game, I’m finding it hard to summon the will to continue.