Mass Effect 2 - Thoughts

Mass Effect 2 has an amazing opening. An interstellar cruiser with an asteroid hull teleports out of nowhere and obliterates your ship, ostensibly killing your main character Commander Shepard in the process. Of course Shepard doesn't stay dead—and your ship gets reconstructed—but the bold start does more than just thrill: it establishes for all intents and purposes that the first Mass Effect has also been obliterated. Gone are the cumbersome inventories, the worthless RPG options, and the low-stakes conversations of the past. Mass Effect 2 is cleaner, more cinematic, and a categorical upgrade to the first game in almost every way. And it's not only a superior title—it's one of the best games on the Xbox 360.

That's not to say that Mass Effect 2 doesn't stumble. The worst part about the game is that it happily throws only two types of minigames at you over the course of thirty hours, meaning you'll "play" them over a hundred times. They're better than the droll Simon Says nonsense in the first game, but since neither minigame increases in intensity or complexity, they get real old real fast. Besides that, there's a slew of BioWare Bugs™ that will inevitably force a reload, and the UI remains in need of improvement. For instance, your upgrade catalog is sequestered to a computer terminal, ordered alphabetically instead of by type for some reason. And you can't even see what your squadmates' abilities do unless you bring them on a mission! I also have some reservations about the combat, but I'll get to that in a bit.

Mass Effect 2's failings may agitate, but they never really pull the game down. For the most part the rambunctious ride through space is smooth, fascinating, and always entertaining. What helps is that rather than embarking on a disconnected goose chase across the galaxy for an agent gone rogue, Mass Effect 2 is centered on two well-worn premises: building a team and getting revenge. The fabulously-designed Collector ship is an enigmatic vessel that hounds you throughout the story, its eerie, insectoid inhabitants popping up right when you start to forget about them. And your squadmates are as distinct as they are dangerous, being well-worth the effort it takes to recruit them thanks to their diverse designs, colorful backstories, and powerful abilities.

When I call their abilities "powerful", I don't mean it as some bizarre form of fictional flattery—your team in Mass Effect 2 frequently does heavy lifting. Taking cover has become a fundamental part of the series, as any unit left without it will get shredded to bits. Your allies are a key part of that "shredding": they unleash good damage, soften armor, and can pull entrenched enemies airborne so you can fill them with holes. I found myself constantly thanking my squadmates as peripheral foes flew back from concussive blasts or were ignited in a blaze of fire. Whereas the first Mass Effect had me babysitting my squadmates, in 2 I was trying my best to keep up.

Combat is no longer the clumsy slog it was in the first game, but it's not especially deep either. I don't think that's an indictment of the game's quality—I found the action to be plenty serviceable—it's just that you'll bereft of options most of the time. Battlefields can range from narrow hallways to larger stadiums, but since being out in the open is a death sentence, you'll find one piece of cover to plant yourself at and fight from there. And holy cow does Mass Effect 2 love throwing scores of enemies at you, making every encounter feel twice as long as it should be. The rock-paper-scissors system of having to deal with shields-armor-barriers keeps the gunplay from feeling brain-dead, but linking all abilities to the same cooldown pushes you to use same 2-3 routine powers. Again, the combat is satisfying for the most part, it's just that the longer you play Mass Effect 2, the more repetitive you'll notice the encounters are (and nowhere is this more evident than in the Arrival DLC).

Thankfully your journey through the galaxy is no longer comprised of dull rocky wastelands. Mass Effect 2 structures its campaign around recruiting allies and gaining their loyalty, which keeps the story strong, your tasks varied, and the narrative relevant. When you do decide to take a break and explore the unknown, the side missions are all surprisingly unique. True, Blood Pack is a lot like Blue Suns which is a lot like Eclipse, but the backdrops behind the mercenary groups offer the diversity that the first game desperately needed. On one planet you'll infiltrate a quarantined robot facility, on another you'll wade through a misty maze, and on another you'll tip-toe atop a crashed frigate teetering over a cliff. And those are just the side missions, the stuff BioWare is fine with letting you miss!

Lastly, the story retains the same level of excellence, both in content and prose, set by its predecessor. The removal of a lot of casual conversations might be disappointing to some, but I felt that Mass Effect 2 delivered a good mix of discussions both pertinent and incidental. The mystery of the Collectors has a good (though slightly ridiculous) payoff, and you'll come to love chatting with your staggering squad of twelve—or at least find a few to grow attached to. In the grand scheme of things, Mass Effect 2's plot is mostly connective tissue binding the first and third games together, but the enthralling story woven here outshines the tales surrounding it; 2 is the meat of the trilogy's sandwich.

Mass Effect 2's leap over the first game is practically cosmic. It's unarguable that in 2, the promising blueprint of Mass Effect has reached its full potential, culminating in one of the best experiences in gaming's seventh console generation. It's in no way a flawless game, but Mass Effect 2's problems come across as blemishes, not scars. It's an impressive, tense journey loaded with hours of content to ruminate over, managing to never overstay its welcome even if you 100% the game. I don't think any planet-hopping sci-fi video game has topped Mass Effect 2—and though it could be nostalgia speaking, I doubt any ever will.

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Images obtained from: NightSolo.net, etgeekera.com, youtube.com, NorthernLight.org

A Way Out - Thoughts

[contains minor spoilers]

I'm not sure where I stand on A Way Out—I've been left kind of... confused and unimpressed. The premise behind the game is amazing: it's a cinematic, co-op-only campaign about busting out of jail and getting sweet revenge. Despite both characters having their own distinct personalities and motivations, there's a lot about them that just doesn't mesh with the gameplay or the story. Honestly, A Way Out makes a good case for why realistic dialogue was removed for Brothers.

Hazelight's first game, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, is an excellent experience about two kids on a journey to save their father. What sticks out to the player the most throughout it (besides the purposefully awkward controls) are the moments of levity the brothers can engage in, as well as the gut-wrenching ending. Strangely, A Way Out unabashedly mimics these two facets, but comes across as more confused and dissonant due to it.

The main characters being playful and absent-minded in Brothers is great because they're literal kids. But in A Way Out, a mere day after escaping from prison, our convict protagonists invade someone's house and can... play piano? Smell flowers? Build a house of cards? The miscellaneous activities the players can partake in are fun, but they detract from the urgency of the story. Players can opt to avoid silly things, but then they risk missing out on dialogue and character flavor—the ingredients the game is built around. And humdrum activities like watching TV or petting an animal may be within the realm of realism, winding up a sewing machine serves no purpose other than to say, "Hey, look what we programmed into the game!"

Likewise the dialogue isn't natural in a plot that demands it to be. Tonally, Hazelight hits on all the right points, but conversations are frequently stilted, weird, and forced. A Way Out is written with the script consciously in mind, instead of an ear for how conversations should carry from line to line. And even when the dialogue doesn't sound foreign, there's usually not enough substance to what's being said. Most of the game (barring the final act) is played at face value, giving you few reasons to invest in its characters or loathe its cartoonish antagonist. You're better off enjoying the characters for their archetypes and thinking of the story as a pulpy 70s revenge flick.

The reason I'm so down A Way Out isn't because it's terrible; the game was just surprisingly mediocre. It looks alright and is entertaining for the most part, a couple of good co-op ideas popping up now and then. For example, there are occasionally forks in the road that ask the players if they want to solve a problem quietly or with violence, and being forced to row a boat together provides for some good laughs. The cinematic framing of the cutscenes and gameplay—which allow you to view the world through both character lenses at once—is a brilliant touch as well. There's also some fun gunfights the players get to partake in, which is laudable considering this is Hazelight's first crack at that style. However, at the heart of A Way Out is its narrative and its protagonists, and neither one really escapes being a shortcoming of the game.

I like the director behind the game, Josef Fares. I think he's a strong visionary that handles tragedy in his works very well. I believe the problem, however, is that he's a subpar writer—or at least, A Way Out has shown that the script needed more revisions and a serious editor. There's a little bit too much residual DNA left from Brothers here, and while the final act is the strongest moment of the game, the intrigue it brings is too little too late, and honestly comes across as forced. A Way Out's template could be used to make an interesting game in the future, but 'll likely always remember it as a goofy co-op adventure that left me scratching my head.

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Images obtained from: ea.com, ShyGuys.io, VentureBeat.com, TechRadar.com

Mass Effect - Thoughts

The beginning of the most epic trilogy on the Xbox 360 is as rocky as a cliff's face. BioWare's Mass Effect is an active struggle to play—it fights back against your RPG and TPS instincts, trying to blend both but being good at neither. What it is, however, is an extremely stable bedrock to one of the best video game universes of all time. Mass Effect's aesthetics, characters, and interlocking political struggles are second to none in the seventh console generation, and no amount of clunky combat or barren worlds could ever change that.

I think an interesting distinction should be made here: Mass Effect's universe is engrossing but not particularly poignant. It doesn't have a deeper statement to make about our society like Papers, Please, nor is its plot something that can only be done in the video game format like Undertale. What it does well is delightfully simple: it gives you a fully 3D, novelesque sci-fi/fantasy universe to explore on (mostly) your own terms. You'll get to converse with various species, visit colorful planets, and dive into scads of lore and fictional physics. Mass Effect is a big playground where the goal isn't to find and create interesting gameplay scenarios like in sandbox games—it's to merely learn more. Discovering another codex entry or resolving a dispute between business partners is the crux of the game, not player expression.

This is the main reason why Mass Effect works despite its plentiful shortcomings. At the end of the day, what you'll retain from your experience are the conversations, character struggles, and anxiety over the choices you didn't pick. The last aspect—the choices—can unfortunately have shallow results (especially as the series reaches its close), but it feels meaningful in the moment, pushing you to ponder strange-yet-relatable hypothetical conundrums, like "can this species proselytize on the space-UN's property without a permit?" I think these questions can be enlightening without any kind of consequential follow-through, just because it gets you ruminating over which side of the fence you stand on. That's not to say I don't wish the series had greater ramifications for your actions, but that's not really a problem that the first game has to grapple with.

What is a problem is the gameplay. And no, not just the rubbery Mako sections—the gunplay in Mass Effect is a shockingly jittery and imprecise. Although I'm playing through the series as an Adept on the second hardest difficulty available, the challenge put forth by the game really wasn't an issue (especially once my entire biotic catalog was available). My gripes stem from the fact that fighting enemies is rarely satisfying: the framerate is constantly tanking, your weapon accuracy is laughable, foes are either stationary target practice or blitzing you, re-positioning is cumbersome, and the cover system is so sticky that you're better off manually dancing around corners. Meanwhile, whenever your allies aren't body blocking you or dying to god knows what, they're whittling enemies away at imperceptible rate. Keyword being imperceptible, as its an adjective the game is far too comfortable with.

A big problem with Mass Effect is that it wants to be an RPG without providing the information of one. There are no combat logs or floating damage numbers—the best you can surmise from your damage is how fast the enemy health bar (or tiny shield blip) lowers when you're on the offensive. The game provides you with information on the level up screen, but hard numbers about damage, distance, and percentages are fuzzy when you can't observe them during the gameplay. Leveling up truly feels like an arbitrary experience, outside of grabbing whatever nodes give you access to new abilities. And not even all of them are necessary; by the end of the game I was bulldozing through everything with just Lift and Marksman, the former for disabling foes and the latter for as my best DPS ability. I found that Warp and Stasis weren't even worth the time required to select them from the radial menu.

I don't really like the combat in Mass Effect, but thankfully the player can easily adapt to it. Neither the gunplay nor the (often hilarious) Mako sections reach truly abysmal depths—both are mostly a mediocre roadblock to the story. It also doesn't help that the bulk of side missions take place on the same mountainous, featureless planetoids which all happen to contain one of three buildings-slash-battle arenas. Between sniffing out missions in the Citadel's endless, labyrinthine hallways and having every side mission conclude in one of three drab locations, I was more than happy to be done with the game. I barely even touched its arena-based DLC, which featured endlessly spawning enemies (joy.)

Oh, and the last thing I need to begrudge is that inventory management (on the 360 at least) is a downright mess. You can only delete items one at a time, and any weapons or armor mods you purge return you back at the top of the list where your best gear is, meaning you have to scroll all the way down to find the junk you're trying to toss, delete it, and then repeat the process again. For scores of items. It's cumbersome and on top of that I found a large portion of the mods to be useless—why would you want to pick a mod that poisons enemies or slightly bypasses shields when you can choose the one that gives you nearly 40% more damage to most of the enemies in the game? For a game that prides itself on decision making, the gear you acquire has very little of it.

I don't think my good will for the Mass Effect series was misplaced: the first game spins one hell of a yarn that's ultimately rewarding to play through, even as a stand-alone entry. But it's as adventurous as it is unrefined. Mass Effect's laurels rest on its premise and narrative, not on its combat... or its performance... or its planet variety... combat... enemy variety... AI... or even the game's cinematography, which turns cutscenes into be dizzying shish kabob of quick cuts. But for BioWare to stumble this much and avoid landing flat on its face meant they were onto something truly special with Commander Shephard's enduring debut.

(As a side note: I'm actually of the opinion that driving the Mako provides a nice change of pace and is no worse than the shooting sections. Being at the helm of the galaxy's bounciest tank is not great, but it's no more repetitive and obnoxious than the rest of the game.)

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Images obtained from: steam.com, TheMotleyCrew.com, youtube.com, imgur.com