Mass Effect 2 Review

The best part of this game is it’s rich story.  My original play through took me just over 50 hours to complete.  Without spoiling the story too much,  you take control of Commander Shepard.  Your allowed to chose Shepard’s class, appearance and gender.  Your ultimate quest is to go around the entire galaxy to recruit a team and take on an enemy that is threatening the human race and the galaxy.  However it’s not that simple,  to give you an idea of what your working with.  Picture thousands of planets stretching out past our real world galaxy with several different alien species that are all aware of each other.  Some of these alien species get along with each other,  some have hatred built up over years and have been at war with each other.  Some are going through a civil war and some have different beliefs.  The human race was able to find these planets and alien races through something called the Mass Relay, kinda like a dimension warp.  Now since the Human race is the new species,  they are not trusted and both the Humans and other species feel threatened.

The game starts off with a bang.  Before you even get through the first batch of cut scenes,  you die!  You then get brought back to life by a ultra rich pro Human organization called Cerberus.  Again without spoiling the story too much,  Cerberus has big plans for you.  They weren’t going to waste billions of Credits (ME2’s currency) for nothing.  They want you to take out a group called the Collectors.  Cerberus has suspicions that they are wiping out Human Colonies.

Of course you will have hundreds of side quests and meet several hundred more characters of all kinds of different races.  The best part is your in complete control.  You wanna be a smug jerk and only be in it for yourself?  Go for it.  You wanna be the heroic gentleman? You can.  You wanna be somewhere in between?  That’s fine too.  The game allows you to do this through a Paragon/Renegade system.  Paragon is the “good” side and Renegade is the “bad” side.  You can choose whether somebody lives or dies.  You can be rude and to the point or you can be understanding and helpful.  Once your Paragon and Renegade meters start to fill up,  the game will offer you some unique choices that wouldn’t be available without your ratings.  For example,  My character came up to a group of some badass Mercs who weren’t feeling my style.  As we were discussing things,  an option popped on the screen to use my “Renegade”  attitude.  I agreed and promptly shot there leader in the head.  The rest of the Mercs realized I wasn’t playing around and left me alone.  Paragon generally had better options to have a more “complete” play through.