10) Coming out so soon after Dragon Age
Dragon Age is a tough act for any game to follow. Especially a story-heavy RPG from the same developer. Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2 are very different approaches to the same genre, but when one of them is so richly detailed and shrewdly written, the shortcomings of the other are that much more conspicuous.
It is a bit wild that Bioware put out two huge RPGs within such a short time span, but RPGs fans are the ones who benefit from this. Everything else is just opinion, but I think ME2 blows Dragon Age away.
9) It's mostly a shooter
The core gameplay in Mass Effect 2 is a cover-based shooter, built around a narrow set of resistance/attack types. There are also exploding barrels. Oh, and ammo is called "thermal clips" for some reason. Bioware occasionally tries to vary the action by adding gimmicks, generally involving a timer bar or limitations on where you can stand. It's decent enough, I suppose. There's nothing inherently wrong with a cover-based shooter. But when you make the core gameplay so simple, it has a ripple effect through the rest of the game world. Everything in Mass Effect 2 has to be related to an anemic shooter.
The shooting is fairly competent and fun enough in its own right. Firefights can get pretty fierce at times if you're not careful. In no way does it drag down the rest of the game.
Character development
The stripped down shootering hurts the game most in terms of character development. Obviously a lot of thought went into backstories for the characters. But each character's gameplay is determined by a couple of skills and a couple of gun types. And that's it. I didn't care much who tagged along with me for a mission, because a stripped-down shooter leads to stripped down characters.
This makes no sense. Character development is STORY!! STORY, DUDE!! How the character plays in combat shouldn't have any bearing on whether they're interesting or not!! Holy Moses, this one makes my brain hurt.
Let's look at Dragon Age for a moment: We've got Main Character, Tank 1, Tank 2, and Healer. Boy! These character sure are interesting! *slams head against keyboard*
7) Space dungeons
Bioware assembles worlds from sparsely populated boxes connected by lots of codex text. In the fantasy world of Dragon Age, this works well enough. String together dungeons to represent villages, castles, patches of countryside, and, of course, dungeons. Fair enough. But a space opera is another matter entirely. When you're trying to build a galaxy of different worlds and ships and space stations, teeming with alien life, this basic model is really long in the tooth. I knew that every single quest in Mass Effect 2 - every single one! - was going to involve me shootering my way to the far end a linear space dungeon.
*slams head against keyboard*
6) Non-interactive environments
To the credit of Bioware's artists, there's a lot of detail in the space dungeons. But it's almost entirely non-interactive. You get a few conspicuously placed hackable points among environments full of containers, doors, and control panels that do absolutely nothing.
Would be nice if the there was more you could do with the environments, I guess, but it's hardly something I'd get upset about.
5) Minigames
I've done the classes in Bully, the conversations in Oblivion, the guitar solos in Brutal Legend, the dancing in Sid Meier's Pirates, the Pipe Dream hacks in BioShock, and every minigame in every single Ratchet & Clank game. I have never seen minigames as sorely out of place as the three minigames in Mass Effect 2. The two types of hacking are bad enough, but then you get to the planetary scanning. Ye gods, what tedium! I hoped I would be delivered when I finally bought tech to speed up the cursor speed for scanning. No such luck. Slightly sped up tedium is still tedium.
All the minigames are simple and easy. I can understand being annoyed by it, but it doesn't bother me at all.
4) Loot
Tedious minigames are the key to the economy in Mass Effect 2. You need to scan planets to earn minerals. You need the minerals to buy the weapons and tech upgrades you've found or purchased with good old fashioned space bucks. But all this loot chasing is funneled into nothing more than a list of minor global bonuses. There are also bits of armor that I kept forgetting to retire to my quarters to equip. So much for that +10% to an intimidation value that I never got to see anyway. The loot chase is an important part of an RPG. In Mass Effect 2, it is an afterthought locked behind tedium.
I can kind of understand this one as well, but, since I wasn't bothered by the minigames, I'm not bothered by this either. Loot is much better handled this time than in the last game, though.
3) Tech upgrades
The tech upgrades have a system of prerequisites that might mean you don't get your nifty new weapon until you've bought some sort of ammo upgrade that you may never find and have no way of knowing how to get. Many of the upgrades are things like a damage boost for assault rifles, but only when they're shooting at armor. This sort of minutiae is fine for people playing a harshly competitive shooter like Modern Warfare 2. In an AI shooting gallery, I'm not sure I care enough to climb this particular tech tree.
"Blah blah blah the game forces me to search around for the best weapons blah blah blah."
2) Space travel
Next time I'm at the helm of a massive space ship, I hope the interface for flying isn't a matter of scooching a teensy ship model around a picture of a nebula so the view scrolls over and I can see where I'm going. I don't know what Bioware was going for here, but every time Shepherd stepped up to that map display to zip around his toy ship, I pictured him making spaceship noises with his mouth. Pretty much what you'd expect from a guy who collects toys, Shenmue style, for his captain's quarters. Worst. Starship interface. Ever.
This is supposed to be one of the ten things that went "horribly wrong"? smh
1) The story
Mass Effect 2 assumes a lot of familiarity with the original Mass Effect. There are regular callbacks to the events and characters of that game. This is certainly a plus for fans of the first game. But as someone who wasn't a fan of the first game, I was constantly lost about the specifics, and I had no desire to go digging around in the codex. And I certainly didn't get a lot of narrative out of shootering my way to the end of a space dungeon. What was left over was a straightforward yarn about saving the galaxy from bug-like aliens doing insidious things. At least it had a cool finale.
*slams head against keyboard*
