The original Mass Effect is a stupendous combination of detailed world-building, likeable characters, and dynamically branching story beats, hampered only a tad by its unimaginitive sidequests and serviceable shooting mechanics. With Mass Effect 2 though, Bioware not only managed to rectify the errors of the previous title, but it somehow also improved on near everything that made the first game an enjoyable experience.

Mass Effect 2 starts things off with a bang, an unexpected new threat known as the Collectors necessitating Shepard start from scratch to take them down as well as the greater threat that is backing them. However, despite all the politicking and pushing for humanity’s place in the galaxy in the first game, Commander Shepard must rely not on old ties but a new uneasy alliance with a sketchier group. While not exactly evil or despicable, the group backing Shepard now can potentially butt heads with your character… or might fit right in line with how you choose to play your commander. The planets you’ll head to during this adventure are also in a less regulated area of space, meaning your overhead and protection are both far less present in this sequel. It’s not exactly the wild west of space, and the group you’re working with has plenty of good people in it as well, but it is a shift in tone from the first game’s military approach to investigating your enemies and stopping them. All of the wonderful world-building from Mass Effect 1 is still present of course both learned through the readable Codex and in-game conversations. Having laid down the groundwork already, the game can continue to explore new areas, concepts, and even take a closer look at unexplored parts of already established species and worlds. Mass Effect 2 looks at heretofore unmentioned aspects of its galactic society, even letting you finally visit the native homes of a few alien races. The game puts in so many small touches to make it a more believable setting as well, like including the media and advertising side to its fictional culture, and there are characters of little plot relevance who subvert their cultural or species norms because any species with free will is bound to have members come in all stripes rather than adhering to rigid behavioral definitions. Even simple things like having more racial variety on planets make Mass Effect 2 feel less like a set of game environments and more like a science fiction universe.

Much of the main story missions in Mass Effect 2 involve the formation of a proper squad for the perilous assault on the Collectors, meaning each new character gets room to breathe in the plot. You will get to know your character before you properly integrate them into your band of heroes and the game allows you to continue talking to them to learn more about them, uncover their backstories, romance them, and unlock loyalty missions where you can ensure they will be able to perform in the final pivotal battle. Mass Effect 2’s crew has a surprisingly solid mix of aliens and humans. The aliens bring new species to your side like the fast talking salarian biologist Mordin and the surprisingly religious drell assassin Thane, and the humans manage to up their ante after Mass Effect 1 with characters like the rough biotic prisoner Jack, the thief Kasumi, and the grizzled veteran Zaeed. The less-interesting squadmates are not even that bad, but they are rubbing shoulders with some well-rounded characters that make them seem weaker by comparison.

One major highlight of Mass Effect 2 is its connectivity with Mass Effect 1. If you have a complete save file for the first game or fill out the choices you made with an interactive comic, Mass Effect 2 is chock-full of callbacks, progression from old choices, and unexpected reappearances. Some old friends from the first game will rejoin your crew while others you’ll get to see continuing their lives after the events of the first game. Obvious large choices like which characters died in 1 are obviously felt in 2, but even tiny sidequests and small choices end up influencing stuff that crops up. The most surprising had to have been the extremely small detail of a character in Mass Effect 1 offhandedly saying next time they see me they’ll buy me a beer, and sure enough they appear in 2 and deliver on that promise. It’s the kind of continuation that you should expect based on choices with weight and helps make Mass Effect feel like it takes place in an interconnected world.

Naturally, Mass Effect 2 continues to bring up moments of moral complexity itself, with the player developing a personality for their custom Commander Shepard and influencing events based on whether they choose the good Paragon options or bad Renegade options, but both can have equal use and sometimes trend towards moments where neither option is necessarily the best but you must decide on an answer. The dialogue wheel allows you to pick how Commander Shepard speaks to people and responds to situations, and the short description for each option is usually close enough to what Shepard will say save a few surprising deviations, but the game introduces another way to push your Paragon or Renegade lifestyle, having brief moments where you can respond with a quick action during a scene to either help or hurt people. These are usually a bit more straightforward and the telegraphing is good enough that you can usually tell how the action will play out, but I did once accidentally kill a guy thinking I was just going to knock him out.

These choices and your relationship with your squad all culminate in a mission the game gives you ample warning that you should prepare for, load screens even hinting at the fact that the game has actual canon endings where none of the characters survive. That is how far Mass Effect 2 is willing to go with its emphasis on the importance of decisions and interaction. While not every moment carries such a heavy weight behind it, it is shocking to see a game allow you to lose most everyone, and surprisingly, you can carry on that near failure into Mass Effect 3. Admittedly, 2 does have components that make it better played after 1 and its leaves a few things open for the third game to answer, but Mass Effect 2 still is a complete experience on the whole and seems to be easily enjoyable even if it was your first entry in the series.

While most of the story is about working towards that final potential suicide mission, Mass Effect 2 has some surprisingly robust sidequests. Many of them are tied to the loyalty of your crew, but even if the only reason you are going to a planet is to help one of your squadmates with your personal problems, the game does not skimp on creating unique environments and situations. Even if you have little interest in the squadmate themselves, the mission to earn their trust can be an interesting plot on its own in a setting you would never visit otherwise, and not all of Mass Effect 2’s quests are about just killing bad guys either. You can talk yourself into non-violent resolutions, or kill them before they have a chance to strike. The Mako from Mass Effect 1 is gone, and its replacement, the hovering vehicle Hammerhead, is only used in specially designed areas, can fight better and controls better, and there are only a few side quests that require it at all. In fact, these were technically DLC missions, meaning there were no driving missions in the original base game, but the PS3 version of Mass Effect 2 has them built-in. There is no more scouring random planets for the occasional item that will move a counter up 1 point, and what resource gathering Mass Effect 2 does include can be fairly speedy or done without much investment. Find a planet, scan it for resources, and launch probes where the readings are highest, these resources contributing only to your research station and the ability to upgrade the ship and your characters.

One of the more surprising changes to the Mass Effect formula comes in 2 shedding quite a lot of its RPG elements. While you still level up your characters and upgrade them, its a lot more gradual and there are fewer paths to take in that development. On the whole, this seems to have been done to facilitate better combat and removes some needless complexity, and I have to agree that it was the better choice even if I do miss some of those elements. Mass Effect 2 is a third person cover shooter, and in combat you can have two allies backing you up, their AI making them reliable partners who can take down foes fairly well. The first game encouraged near overspecialization and had some paths that took long to pay off, but Mass Effect 2 focuses more on the fun of combat than on the choices found in upgrading a character. The guns in Mass Effect 1 used no ammo, only overheating if you used them too much in rapid succession, but Mass Effect 2 shifts to a traditional ammo clip system and makes gun variety a lot more interesting and important for it. Ammo is not a concern in general, but some weapons chew through it more quickly or hold very little, meaning you will have to shift weapons to match the situation. Abilities can cover your weak spots or enhance your skills, with special ammo types, shots, and skills rounding out your offensive capabilities with unique tricks, and this time around the psychic biotic skills are immediately powerful and helpful in a firefight. The inventory has been done away with entirely, and while you can get new weapons and armor as the game progresses, you choose your loadout before a mission or from special lockers, meaning you can access everything you need quickly in battle and waste no time on micromanaging items with marginally different stats.

All of these components to the cover shooting make Mass Effect’s shooting satisfying and appropriately simple. There are considerations to make, like when to be aggressive, which type of ammo or weapon will work best, and there are boss enemies that crop up now and again, so the shooting feels like it supplements the story moments quite well, even if the plot’s world and characters are certainly the higher quality component of the two. The PS3 version has far less glitches than the previous title but still had animation and audio quirks, but the autosave is smart enough to make recovering from the rare freeze painless as well as making it easy to come back from deaths in battle. The difficulty is not prohibitive if you want to get to the next story moment, but it’s no pushover unless you set it to be. You can even feel the gradual progression of your strength as enemies go down more quickly later in the game, so the RPG elements that remain aren’t entirely disconnected from the action.

THE VERDICT: When you build off the base of a great game, it’s hard to imagine things going anywhere but up. An already established world means Mass Effect 2 is able to focus on making the shooting more enjoyable, the characters more interesting, and the side quests actually worth the effort to complete. Spectacular devotion to meaningful moments and top-shelf writing ensures that Mass Effect 2 truly deserves the love its fans heap upon it.

And so, I give Mass Effect 2 for the Playstation 3…

A FANTASTIC rating. Mass Effect 2 is a reactive and interactive game, balancing moments of subtle resonance with grandiose spectacle and dramatic weighty choices with simpler payoffs. Commander Shepard’s personal relationships are just as affected by their behavior as the cultures they interact with and the galactic events they’re entangled in, and Mass Effect 2 will not pull punches on showing the consequences of your choices. The shooting is as strong as many of its contemporaries but adds abilities to the picture to mix up the play, and an abundance of secondary quests experiment with the ways combat and conversation can intertwine. Not everything leads to earthshaking results or breathtaking moments, but there is plenty of interesting things going on in this remarkably well constructed galaxy to drive you forward. It has a few rough edges, mostly in regards to technical aspects, but the parts that matter have been given so much love and attention that Mass Effect 2 makes for an amazing gaming experience.

Consequence, character, creativity. Mass Effect 2 focuses hard on these three important aspects, and they combine well into a product that shows us the strength of the gaming medium when it comes to creating a truly interactive story.