This is the first, and hopefully will be, the only video game, that I have played hooky to play.
This game fit me like a glove--while imperfect, I really did not want to do anything else but play this game for a good few days after the release date.
So, first of all, a HUGE thanks to Bioware for making this game! My $60 only captures a fraction of the gratitude I have for the craftsmen of the ME universe (But no, I won't pay more than 60 for a game, no matter how much I want it).
That said, I thought I would take the time to give the community members, and perhaps a lurking dev or two, my comments/criticism on their product, as a consumer and a fan.
I'll just put my opinions in whatever order they occur to me. If you manage to wade through all of this, I salute you.
- Scanning sucks. If I did not have to scan for resources I would be in my 5th or 6th playthrough. I just do not want to scan planets, even with the import bonus. It is better than rolling around in the Mako, but only by a little IMO. Luckily I don't have to deplete every planet--if I did, I would be really ticked. When I started my second playthrough I was still running on the excitement built up from the opening scenes of my first playthrough. On my third playthrough I started, looked at my private terminal, went to upgrades, and seriously QQ'd.
- Combat was amazing. It was nearly perfect, the only gripes I had being the still weak squad AI and their uselessness in dealing damage with their weapons. Every fight I ordered them into very far away cover and just used their powers, or I commanded them right into the fire to tank for me while I ran for cover or sniped them. But besides that, which was not very hard to get over, combat was fun, engaging, visceral, etc. I had a lot of fun maneuvering (sp?) and picking off enemies with varied tactics--cloaking, peeking around a corner, then BOOM headshotting something in the infiltrator's bullet-time. I also had fun using Jacob's pull field on a bunch of husks then setting them all on fire with a flamethrower, and throwing/slamming the remnants on my sentinel.
- HUMOR! I cannot tell you how much more enjoyable the game was simply because of humor. I freaking love Garrus--Shep/Garrus is the original outer-space bromance. Mordin made me laugh as I thought about him in the middle of class once, earning me a lot of ridicule from one of my more crabby teachers! Sometimes humor popped up in the most unexpected places--headbutting Uvenk, or "I do not have time for your solid waste excretions!"--and it added a lot of flavor. It was well done; after all, imagine Hamlet without the Gravedigger scene! Or King Lear without his Fool! Humor complements tragedy very well, and as ME2 is the darkness before the epic conclusion, humor really helped things along.
- The plot had a lot of holes, some of which were jarring and annoying, but each individual miniplot the characters had were really engaging. I found stories I could relate to, characters I hated but learned to love, which made me feel guilty--Guilt! From a CD that I put into an Xbox! From pixels and sounds!--when found out about them. I wish they gave me a reason for putting my entire squadmate roster on a shuttle, but I am willing to overlook these relatively minor blips when fighting for Tali's innocence or giving Garrus a shot at revenge were just as good as watching a really good episode of your favorite TV show.
- RPG elements were lacking, but I never expected them from ME in the first place. There was whining pre-ME1 about the lack of RPG elements in ME, and it turns out that being in the middle, as ME1 was, is worse than being on one side of the fence, ME2 being somewhat more action than RPG gameplay-wise. If one truly wanted an RPG shooter, why not have a lock-on system, so that each time the trigger is pulled a dice is rolled determing a hit or not? Or turn-based combat, like Fallout 1 or 2? There are ways to have RPG shooters, but ME was never meant to be like that. An inventory would have been nice, but I found it unecessary. Research projects were fine by me, except all of the time spent scanning to actually get them was really bothersome.
Now, however, I am really looking forward to more from the DLC deparment. There is an empty port observation area on deck 3, and a whole lotta space in the cargo hold, after all...
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