When Bioware struck out from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic with their own space opera RPG setting in Mass Effect, they planned for it to be part of a trilogy. With its world-building of alien races and their government structures, plucky humanity on the up, and lurking ancient threats (held back for now thanks to your actions), it set up a sequel rather nicely. So it comes as a bit of a surprise when Mass Effect 2 hits a reset button hard and early, killing main character Shepard and time-skipping a couple of years before resurrecting her under the control of dodgy human supremacists Cerberus.
Mass Effect’s technological and team-based approach means there was no glaring need for an emphasis on weakening Shepard, who wasn’t some elite Jedi by the end of the first game. With more new worlds to explore, there would also be plenty of newness regardless. Instead, to boldly shake up the status quo has its benefits in setting a new tone and in the world of player choice, one of the trickiest problems Bioware set themselves to navigate.
Knights of the Old Republic II was a new story in the same world, but not only does Mass Effect 2 follow on with Shepard, it imports choices and their effects from finished files of the original Mass Effect (unless, like me, you lost your save during an intervening decade). The more the same people and settings were central, the more divergence it would have to deal with as a result. Plausibly moving on many of the main characters helps to control the sprawl and make things more welcoming for newcomers. Also Shepard can get a particularly bad case of the game’s human characters’ tendency towards the plasticine in their appearance, so having her rebuilt by technology at least makes that an in-story feature.
Gradually building a team was one of the more enjoyable aspects of the first game, and Mass Effect 2 takes some big and distinctive steps to put that right at its centre too. Rather than a sequential series of missions, for most of the game you know the ultimate goal — make a jump to the mysterious system where the big bad Collectors are hanging out and take them on — and are given a set of dossiers to prompt you to recruit and develop a team to allow you to do so, in whatever order you see fit. As well as giving a sense of freedom and helping the galaxy seem a bit bigger, the emphasis on people is exactly right for the series’s strengths in introducing big characters and playing them off against each other.
You get to know each new crew member, from reserved assassin to intense murderer to gawky scientist, and as you talk to them more you find out something you can do to help each of them. Sometimes, largely around attitudes to the Cerberus operation, these priorities don’t line up and you have to mediate between them. Whether in high pressure situations or just hanging out on your resurrected spaceship, the characters drive things, the situations twist nicely with some snappy dialogue, and it’s easy to get drawn into enjoying all of the details. Questions of morality get some interesting, if rather broad play, as is kind of inevitable when your team includes human supremacists, a genocide technician and a guy for whom the cops aren’t cop enough.
For all the talking you get to do, though, at least as much of Mass Effect 2 is, inevitably, spent in combat. This moves even further away from turn-based RPG mechanics and further into third-person cover shooter. Specifically, this being 2010, it looks and sounds even more like Gears of War, with carefully arranged battle playfields, a shaky following camera for dashes, and red mist creeping in as you take damage and fading as you take cover. Call it the mass audience effect. There are still tactics, different types of defences to deal with in different ways, team members to direct, but it’s no Gears of War and I found myself kind of wishing I was back in the world of dice rolls and Vitality Points denoting character health.
Even aside from my personal tastes, the streamlining and precision of the combat contributes to a sense of sameness. The sense that every situation will eventually end up in a gunfight doesn’t do wonders for tension, either. Going to collect a prisoner from an absurd high security facility would feel higher stakes if there was any doubt about the fact a trap would be sprung or about how to get out of it.
This is where Mass Effect 2’s place as a mainstream video game takes it away from its most obvious inspirations from the episodic camaraderie of Star Trek or, more contemporary, Firefly. Bioware have a very good go at coming up with a similar charming cast, and stretch the structure to make their problems and interactions as central as they can. There’s just only so much space and possibility available when it also has to bow to the logic of shooting everything going.
Characters acting one way in a story and at a remove in combat is an age-old RPG problem, an age-old video game problem even. It just actually feels more acute when the two are so well mechanically integrated, and when the combat logic comes into the story so much. The mission you get to help traumatised psychic Jack involves going to the facility where she was experimented on as a child and having her blow the whole place up. Once you’re done, the mission completion screen tells you that now “Jack should have no further emotional issues distracting her from the mission”. That’s not how that works, but the structure of the game dictates that it is. And from one side, that’s why it’s a beloved game. It’s an RPG shooter in a deep and impressive world which tells appealing stories while continually being an effective RPG shooter. From another, it can’t help but feel like a missed opportunity to watch these people and relationships develop more without such tight restrictions.
Top of the charts for week ending 30 January 2010:
Top of the charts for week ending 6 February 2010:
