Mass Effect 2

Disclaimer: This rant will openly discuss spoilerific story elements. It is not a gameplay review, although gameplay will be brought up if it is important to/detracts from the story.


Mass Effect 2 opens with a bang. Taking full advantage of medias in res, the game hooked my jaded attention immediately. As the crew evacuates, Shepard trudges on to save Joker, eventually getting jettisoned into space to suffocate as the gorgeous opening music plays.

Then, his (I played a male Shepard, so I'll use male pronouns) body is recovered, and we get a neat sequence of him being rebuilt over the course of two years. Despite the questionable science of being able to reconstruct someone's personality from a scrap of genetics, it's a great set up to drive the story. It means time has passed, but the player can be naturally introduced to new information about the setting. It gives the bad guys a real sense of danger (I mean, hell, they killed me once). And it saddles Shepard in the midst of Cerberus, the organization that rebuilt him.

Unfortunately, after the amazing introduction, the game settles into mediocrity.

The trouble with giving a blank slate character and a branching choice system is that the game writers must come up with extremely solid justification for whichever direction the game story chooses to railroad you in. When you have an actual character with a personality, the motivation only has to work for the character. With a Bioware hero, they have to convince the player, which can be much more difficult.

Cerberus, the former pro-human terrorist organization that Shepard fought numerous times in the original Mass Effect, sets to bossing him around. The justification is that Cerberus and the Illusive Man are working to save outlying human colonies from the Collectors, who have ties to the Reapers. Now, anyone who has played, watched, or read any science fiction ever can guess that Cerberus plans to weaponize the Reapers. I mean, what shady organization in sci-fi history has ever not wanted to weaponize the ultimate destructive force in the universe?

Not only are they incredible untrustworthy, Cerberus also withholds information, orders Shepard around on his own ship, and even puts his former crew in direct danger to further their objective.

This creates a really awkward moment when characters ask Shepard things like "Why are you working for Cerberus? They're so obviously evil – not to mention they tried to kill you before."

Then, the dialog options pop up. "They're trying to save the universe!" you can cry. "I'm not working for them. They're working for me," you can somehow say with a straight face. But all I want to say is "I wish I knew! This is absurd. Please let me out of this shakily laid plot."

But, like a resigned player in a poorly told D&D campaign, Shepard has to make weak excuses for his involvement in the GM's master plan.

From here, it's hard to talk too much about Mass Effect 2's story. Shepard is tasked with recruiting crew members to help him take on the Collectors. And because non-linearity is a tag that executives or developers or both like to slap on video games, you can recruit your crew in any order. And recruiting them in the vast majority of the game, which means that most of the game is made up of ambling side quests only vaguely related to the overarching plot.

So let's have a look at the characters, shall we?

On to Miranda...