The great debate got me thinking about Mass Effect... as if I weren't already, heh. I liked Mass Effect 2 more than 1, but I liked the first one, too. What did the second one do better? I'm glad you (I) asked!


The Mako

Does anybody have fond memories of the Mako? Having to drive that thing was like getting teeth pulled. Yes, I was able to manage. I racked up plenty of totally random loot from planets across the galaxy. But getting that thing to go over various hills and cliffs was not only totally boring, but also way harder than it needed to be.


As it should be, the Hammerhead is depicted higher than the Mako.

Enter the Hammerhead, which rocks the socks off of the Mako in terms of speed, maneuverability, etc.. Also, it can jump properly! I found the controls had a great feel to them. I wish the main portion of the game had more sections with it. I hear Overlord has some, but I haven't played that yet.


"RPG aspects"

It's no secret that Mass Effect 2 essentially jettisoned most of the RPG aspects of the first one, primarily the obnoxious inventory system, some items like grenades, and some parts of the skill tree. I guess some people don't like that they did that. Going into it at the beginning, I was apprehensive about it, to be sure. But as I started playing, then continued playing, I found that I didn't really miss those things much. I got a max of about 10 new non-heavy weapons throughout the course of the game, but I didn't feel robbed about it. I guess something as shallow as upping just a damage number isn't too interesting unless the game artificially attributes importance to it.

Mass Effect 2 had fewer skills overall, but I didn't really feel this was a problem. At least for my play style, I was content to delve deeply into a few skills rather than learn broadly.

What I didn't like about them, though, is that for each individual skill, I felt that the final branching choice for "evolving" the skill was a wasted opportunity. Almost universally, every skill could evolve either into the "do more of X to a single target" or the "do less damage to more people" variety. And the "class" skills were even worse. Most of them evolved into either "more health" or "more damage" or something equally boring. I think that those skills could have been much more interesting.

What if one of the evolutions of Throw allowed it to hurl objects into enemies? Or maybe it could make enemies that were thrown ricochet to hilarious and deadly effect? Maybe an evolved Warp could cause the target of it to, itself, send warps out to other nearby enemies? Or maybe it could turn the corpse into a warp trap for someone else to walk over? I'm thinking of some of the plasmids in Bioshock 2 as I write this. Now that's a game with interesting evolved powers.


Cookie-cutter missions

Mass Effect 1's planets were littered with weird little missions that were all some kind of variation on infiltrating a pretty generic building, killing a bunch of dudes plus maybe a head dude, and looting like crazy. I love loot as much as the next guy, but I wasn't feeling it.



Mass Effect 2 made sure that almost all the side missions you go on are memorable and unique, especially with the inclusion of good dialog and decisions, which is my favorite part of the game.

On the other hand, I kind of miss the sense of being able to stumble upon missions on random planets in the middle of nowhere. There could have been more spice to that. It doesn't matter if you have a huge number of planets if most of them have nothing going on.