Before I get into the gist of the review I feel it is worth mentioning that I am an unabashed Science Fiction nut. Be it films, books or videogames, I enjoy a genre piece more than any other. So when game developer BioWare announced that their first Xbox 360 RPG would not only be a space faring story full of aliens and lasers, but also a trilogy of games, I was in Geek Heaven. The wait between the console launch and the first game was months of tracking down tidbits, screenshots, videos, anything I could find. And when I was finally able to play the game it was easy to look beyond whatever faults it may have had and enjoy what has become one of my all time favorite RPGs.

With all that in mind one could probably imagine me waiting for the sequel with baited breath and sweaty anticipation. But to be quite honest I actually forgot the sequel was coming until last E3 when the first images and videos began to come out of the secretive folks at BioWare. Then I started getting excited.

Now that the game has come out, could it possibly live up to the lofty expectations that I had started to attach to it? In a word – Yes.

While the first game took what BioWare created for Star Wars Knights of The Old Republic and refined it into an original universe with it’s own history and politics, Mass Effect 2 takes that game and ramps everything up into a new level that breaks what I’ve come to expect from Role Playing Games.

For those needing a brief refresher course on the Mass Effect universe I’ll break it down. Players take on the role of Commander Shepard, a member of the Alliance, the military arm of Humanity’s space exploration force. After trying to save a human colony, Shepard unwillingly becomes involved in a plot that if unchecked could end all life in the galaxy. Shepard becomes a Spectre, a sort of mercenary type investigator for the center of intergalactic politics, the Citadel, tasked with hunting down a rogue Spectre named Saren.

Cut to two years later and this is where the events of Mass Effect 2 pick up. It seems that soon after stopping Saren, Commander Shepard has gone missing. In the Commanders absence a new threat has emerged from the back reaches of space. A mysterious race of insect like beings, known only as the “Collectors”, have started kidnapping entire Human colonies on the edge of occupied space. The Alliance and the Citadel, too busy rebuilding after Saren, don’t have the resources to investigate. In comes Cerberus, a Human Rights organization / suspected terrorist cell. With a seemingly infinite flow of resources, Cerberus – led by the “Illusive Man” – finds Shepard and tasks the Commander with what looks like a suicide mission: Infiltrate the Collectors’ space and find the missing Human colonists. But the Human Spectre won’t be in it alone, the Commander must recruit a team of dangerous and deadly agents in order to have a chance of surviving.

Of course that’s just the outside synopsis of a game that has a lot more going on than just a typical A to B story. During the course of Shepard’s adventure you’ll cure a deadly disease that is infecting an alien population, you may help a former ally fall down the path of revenge, you will even have the chance to reunite a family that has been torn apart by a manipulative father. Your morality will be tested more and more as Shepard gets closer to divining the mystery of the Collectors and their seeming connection to the events of the past.

Upon launch gamers will notice that in the intervening years since the release of the first game, the developers at BioWare have improved nearly every aspect of the game. From gunplay to conversations to graphics, there isn’t a single aspect of this game that hasn’t been improved upon.

Front and center in the improvements is the basic core of the game, the combat. In Mass Effect 1 players where treated to a game that seemed to be a third person shooter, but it was actually a clever Dungeons & Dragons style dice roll system. When players pulled the trigger a series of number shuffles, or dice rolls, were performed behind the scenes to see if the bullets hit their targets. It didn’t matter how well you were able to aim, as the outcome was all based on the numbers and player’s stats. While it worked fine for that game, the developers wanted to take it to a new level for the sequel.

Getting rid of the D&D scheme for shooting, BioWare has embraced a true third person shooter engine for Mass Effect 2. What this means is that the accuracy and aim is entirely left up to the players’ skills. If you aim for the head, you end up with a head shot, same with body shots and so forth. Instead of being up front the dice roll has now been moved to the back end, determining the damage dealt to the opponent. The game takes all the stats – from gun used to players experience earned skills – and uses that for damage. What this translates to is a combat scheme that feels more visceral and real than anything in the first game. While it isn’t quite Gears of War, Mass Effect 2 has combat that could compete with the very best in the genre.

In addition to a combat engine overhaul, BioWare has also tweaked the inventory and damage aspects of the sequel as well. Adopting a more modern “healing” shield damage system seen in such games as Modern Warfare 2 and Halo 3, players will take damage losing shields and eventually health, but it will all regenerate to full if the player is able to hide in cover for a while. Taking criticisms of the past game to heart they’ve tossed the inventory system out the window too. In Mass Effect 1 players were able to find new armor and weapons, along with multiple armor and weapon upgrades. This, on top of a confusing inventory system, caused many players to gripe about the antiquated system. In Mass Effect 2 there is no inventory at all. In fact the only thing players really need to worry about holding are health packs to heal fallen teammates and ammunition for weapons. Otherwise all upgrades that are found, whether for armor or ammo are all sent directly to the “hub” ship area for player to research. And once “researched” the upgrades will apply to ALL members of the team. Say you find a data pad that contains a “10% Shield Increase”, after you complete whatever mission you are on, just head to the ship, spend the elements and minerals needed to unlock it, and from that point on everyone will have 10% more shields. While the upgrades aren’t everywhere and under every rock, they are still plentiful and finding them all will help your team survive the suicide mission of taking down the Collectors.

Mentioning the “elements and minerals” means I do have to go into the one part of the game that doesn’t live up to expectations – and that is the finding of said items. In Mass Effect 1 BioWare gave players an entire universe to explore, with multiple galaxies and multiple planets in each galaxy. Players were able to highlight each planet and simply hit the “Y” button to scan for minerals – but aside from a minor quest the minerals weren’t used for anything. Lots of gamers lamented on the fact that it really didn’t seem that they were exploring. For the sequel BioWare decided that this was another area that could use a little “sprucing up”.

Every upgrade in the game, from Armor enhancements to starship armor, uses minerals and elements that need to be found or mined throughout the universe. And instead of just heading to planets and hitting a simple button to find the resources, there is now a mini-game involved. Players fly their ship (now fully controllable when jetting from planet to planet and system to system) to a planet or asteroid and enter into orbit. As they enter orbit they are given a description of the celestial body along with a rating from “Poor” to “Rich”. Using these categories as a guide players hit “Y” to enter scan mode. A grid appears on the planet and then you hold down the left trigger to start scanning the planet grid by grid, when the controller starts to vibrate and the E.K.G.-ish scanner shows a mineral deposit you hit the right trigger to fire a probe. Once the probe lands and finds the minerals you continue the search. Most planets have at least 15 mining points, but the “Rich” planets can have 30 or more. While all this sounds nice on paper, in practice it is anything but. The scanner moves slowly, like stuck in goo slow. And you only have a set amount of probes that you can carry (30 – though you can increase that amount with an upgrade later, along with the scanner speed). So as you go through your collection of probes you have to fly your ship to the nearest fuel depot to buy more, but flying your ship around also consumes fuel, so you have to buy that as well. It can be a VERY time consuming and expensive distraction from the rest of the game, and if it was just for exploration I would be okay with it as an unneeded sidequest. But since the minerals are so closely tied to the upgrades and you NEED those upgrades to survive the later part of the game that means you also need to play through this part of the game. If you spread it out through the game I suppose it would merely be a nuisance, but if you are like me and have an OCD-like need to explore everything – it gets highly annoying very quick. It truly is the one aspect of the game that drags it down.

Thankfully the game has such a well written and rewarding story going for it that it is easy to forgive this small transgression. And if you enjoyed the tale spun in Mass Effect 1, let me just say that Mass Effect 2 takes that story and makes it seem like a Dr. Seuss tale. While I loved the characters from ME1, none of them are as alive and vibrant as the cast of rogues you meet in the sequel. While some familiar faces do show up from time to time, for the large part most of the cast is new. And you will come to care what happens to each person on your team, from human to alien. While in ME1 it seemed that most of the motley cast were thrown at you, in ME2 you actually have to go out and find them – not only that, but every character you recruit to join you on this suicide mission also has a “loyalty” quest. If you can complete these semi-optional missions the team will become increasingly loyal to Shepard, making your chances of surviving the final onslaught that much greater. This gives each character a history and “life” that the first game just couldn’t match, from the Cerberus agent who is with you from the beginning to the tortured and tattooed criminal who wants nothing more than to kill everyone who crosses her path.

Adding to the characters is a morality system that expands on everything the first game set out to do. While in ME1 the choices were pure good or bad, the morality in Mass Effect 2 is less black and white than that. Now it isn’t so much a choice of whether to let an entire species live or die, its more of sometimes letting a criminal go because their family would suffer if they died. While that choice will earn you the “evil” Renegade points – it almost seems to be the right thing to do. It makes each decision that much harder to make. Someone trying to play a pure Paragon, the “good” path, may think they are choosing right, only to find that they’ve earned Renegade points after all. This system wouldn’t work as well if the tale wasn’t so expertly woven.

I’d feel a bit remiss if I didn’t mention the other big selling point of the game, the ability to import your character and save data from Mass Effect 1. When you launch the game you are given the option to bring in your established character, which entails mostly every decision you made in game 1. Doing this gives a starting character a few bonuses like starting at a higher level and a bit more starting cash, but it also personalizes the game far more than even I expected. During my playthrough I hardly visited any location that didn’t have something mentioned from what I did in the first game. If I saved someone on Feros there was a chance I’d run into them on Illium. My decisions about the Council and the Citadel were thrown in my face when I visited a former commanding officer at the aforementioned Citadel. It seems like such a small thing on the surface, but it really made me feel that I have a part in crafting this incredible game. It is utterly unlike anything I have ever experienced in a game before. Sure I’ve played sequels that mentioned events in the previous game, but never in quite the same way this one does. And some of the people I ran into even gave me sidequests. To think, if I had killed that character in the first game, I might not be able to partake in that particular mission. I really do encourage anyone who wants to get into this game to first play through the first, otherwise you are missing out on a major part of the story and emotional impact.

Mass Effect 2 is a game I’ve been anticipating for a while now and it more than lives up to expectations, in fact it goes beyond what I expected in many ways. Aside from the small flaw of the planet scanning mini-game, I whole-heartedly recommend everyone pick this game up. Not just RPG or Sci-Fi fans either, this is a game that really should be experienced by all gamers. A true example of what a story based videogame should be.