Going to repost some of my major criticisms from previous threads to see if anyone here shares any of them.
I'll start by saying ME2 was no means *bad.* It was a decent game, and I did enjoy it. I did not, however, enjoy it anywhere near as much as I enjoyed the first game.
I'll first voice my distaste for the art direction - simply put, it's horrible. Note, this is solely a criticism about the art direction, NOT the graphics - undeniably the technical aspects of the graphics were improved in ME2. It's just a pity they didn't put those improvements to good use. BioWare themselves describe the game as "the dark second installment in the Mass Effect trilogy." And if bolding "dark" wasn't enough to get across the point that they wanted this game to be gritty and suspenseful, just look at Omega - there are no bright colors to be seen. I don't know about everyone else, but I've always found it somewhat insulting when developers think the best way to have their game be percieved as "dark" is to throw black paint over all the scenery. This is especially jarring when taken in comparison to the sleek, smooth, bright look of the first game that, at least for me, lent itself to an absolutely superb atmosphere - I wanted to explore the galaxy and see more things because everything was beautiful and awe-inspiring, even the more drab locales such as Feros had their moments (the skyway, for example). A direct consequence of this is that I felt more suspense in ME1 than I did in ME2. There was a much greater sense of not wanting to lose everything in the galaxy when it all looked so nice. Also, on more minor note, I'd take the sleek spandex-suit light armor over the new, blocky, absurd-looking n7 armor any day.
Now, on to more important matters. The one that is most often pointed to as ME2's greatest failing, and rightly so, is the plot. Now, many, many people have made long posts that point out the individual flaws, so I doubt there's any worth picking it apart and showing how weak it is because in all likelihood everyone here has already read everything I would say. However, while the plot itself certainly is weak and incoherent, there's an even worse problem with it - it is completely absent from the majority of the game. Most of your missions in Mass Effect 2 have literally no sensible narrative-based motivation. You spend most of the game scurrying around recruiting a team of badasses, while the collectors gobble up human colonies. This does not make sense. In what is supposed to be a narrative-driven three game epic space opera, it's a serious problem when the majority of the second part of your trilogy is spent showing your protagonist running around and solving his crewmate's emotional crises, when doing so does absolutely nothing to logically progress the narrative. In fact, quite the opposite, it makes Shepard, and, indeed, most people in the galaxy seem like a bunch of bumbling morons - here you have a huge menace, and for most of the game you completely ignore it, until at the very end you run at it alone, with one ship, and it just so happens that despite your completely idiotic preparation you still manage to defeat it without breaking a sweat.
Now, the gameplay. Personally, I found ME2's gameplay to be a significant step backwards in more or less every aspect other than the cover system. Guns now need ammo (leading to some utterly hilarious retconning and inconsistencies). Biotics went from awesome, visceral telekenitic abilities of doom to being utterly irrelevant (with the exception of Warp and Reave, which still are pretty lame as they're more or less damage buttons). The global cooldown blew, and removed any possibility of ability synergy (good luck warping a biotic power before your target died), in addition to simply killing many abilities (barrier). Any semblance of RPG mechanics were either removed or dumbed down to the point of irrelevance. Gear progression, especially, took a huge hit - weapon progression become a completely linear planet-scanning grind. Yes, the ME1 inventory needed to be streamlined, and yes, the weapon skills perhaps could have been rebalanced such that they didn't feel so static. However, cutting them out completely was a huge mistake, and did not benefit the game at all. I have to reiterate my disdain for what has been done to biotics - when I played a vanguard in ME1 and could hurl five geth twenty feet backwards and watch them hit a wall and crumple to the ground, it felt *awesome.* Yes, maybe it could have done with a bit of rebalancing, but it was *awesome.* In ME2, this was completely and utterly gone. Not only that, but seemingly every character and their mother had a random biotic power thrown in - they simply weren't special anymore. There were many ways of balancing biotics from ME1 (a global cooldown certainly was not the right choice, and I do hope they remove that in ME2); perhaps a dynamic cooldown system that would supercharge a power to be at ME1 strength if you left it to cool down for long enough, coupled with an overall reduction in efficacy (but not a complete neutering, as was done in ME2).
That said, ME1 did get a few things right - the weapon variety was somewhat nice, I did enjoy the two different types of each weapon. In fact, had that been coupled with a streamlined (not removed) gear progression system it probably would have been a large improvement. Alas, it was not so - you have a grand total of one gun, which occasionally can get a +10% damage boost if you feel like grinding for long enough. How anyone could see *that* as an improvement, I don't know.
The planet scanning itself is a huge joke - many draw comparisons to the ME1 mako, but this isn't even a fair analogy. You were never forced to do the resource collection side-mission in ME1 to get end-game reactivity, and if you did there would have (rightly) been a whole load of complaints about it. The fact that a large chunk of end-game reactivity and all possible gear progression was linked to this ****ty, ****ty minigame is somewhat disgraceful, and I have no clue how it wormed its way into the final game.
Well, this has gotten a bit plodding, it seems, so I think I'll stop it here. Felt good to organize everything into one giant, coherent rant. As for a plot analysis, I think I'll do a full one after I finish a few playthroughs of ME3 (whenever it comes out) - I'm sure I'll have even more holes to pick at, then.
One final side-note: I hope the DLCs aren't required to have a sensible story arc, because that would be shameful, BioWare. I expect to buy a complete game when I go to the store, not a game that would have to be patched up through individually priced segments later on.
Retour en haut
