Fish faced assassin Thane is one your crews newest, and arguably best, new additions

Right from the games opening moments the tone is set for the rest of the plot, which is unspeakable material hitting the proverbial fan at high speed over and over again. Things go from bad, to worse to communal shower unpleasant pretty quickly and you as Commander Shepherd seem to be paddling against the current no matter which way you turn. It’s the classic plot device of creating a strong confident character and then breaking him down as many ways as possible and it works. The plot of the first Mass Effect got pretty convoluted at the halfway mark with far too many missions pulling you in all sorts of directions so you’d often forget all about Sarin and the Reapers and that whole end of the world thing you were supposed to be stopping. In Mass Effect 2 your goals are always in your direct line of sight and almost everything you do is working towards them.

Sony brand androids didn't always handle the regular firmware updates very well

The games plot begins with Shepherd being rescued and brought back to life by the organisation known as Cerberus. Two years have passed and assuming he was dead the team from the original game has disbanded. Although Cerberus were an enemy on side quests in the original game they, notable the elusive Illusive Man, convince Shepherd to assist them with investigating the disappearance of several human colonies, disappearances the Alliance forces haven’t looked into. They go through the expense of reviving Shepherd as they believe the Reapers are involved in the attacks using a strange insectoid alien race called the Collectors. Shepherd’s first call of order is to recruit a new team before chasing down the Collectors.

The game is just as gorgeous as it was before, with the amazing graphics wisely being spaced over two discs. It's such a gorgeous game I'd have been more than happy to swap between three or even four discs to keep the graphics integrity at such a high level. The audio of the game is again top notch with a few recognisable famous voice performances such as Seth Green as your pilot Joker. The aliens all have suitably strange croaky voices and the sound effects over all are fantastic. If every RPG looked and sounded as good as Mass Effect 2 a lot more people would be playing RPG's.

The game immediately sets itself up as a darker and meaner universe than the previous Mass Effect. Cerberus are a dodgy outfit with a pretty low attitude to non human races and as you catch up with your old crew the alien members express pretty blunt feelings about you working for them. Added to this their leader the Illusive Man, expertly voiced with warm and endearing dishonesty by Martin Sheen, keeps you in the dark about most of what he knows. When you do meet your old crew many of them have fallen on hard times and few are very happy to see you, don’t expect many hugs. The new crew you pick up feels like the entire cast of the Mos Eisley Cantina from Star Wars. Bounty hunters, war criminals, convicts, assassins and general psychopaths, they’re certainly a more colourful group than your last charges. As with Mass Effect, the characters are all well developed and interesting and set a high bar for story telling in games. The only drawback is that much of the plot is reliant on you being familiar with the last game and it’s up to the new initiate to scroll through the various game information logs to pick up the pieces. But when you can pick up the original for a budget price or download it straight to your hard drive its well worth your time playing it through before you play Mass Effect 2. Plus you can transfer your save game from the first game for some bonuses and achievements. This enhances the experience a great deal, your previous history and experiences with characters in the course of your Mass Effect game change the status and situations in Mass Effect 2. Be careful of your decisions in Mass Effect 2 as well as they will carry over to the all ready confirmed Mass Effect 3.

Tali is just one of a few of your original crew who join your new mission

I love my quality game plots, rare though they are, but Mass Effect had just a bit too much talking for me and I often found myself skipping through conversations. Bioware has this nasty habit of forcing their characters to restate something five different ways and everything had to be laid out in painful detail. The conversation streams in Mass Effect 2 are much more streamlined and there’s a recognisable structure between conversations, particularly with your crew, so you know when something has to be said to further the story and when something’s just an option to chat away and get some character background. Some of the more flippant conversations have a greater bearing on your actions than you might imagine and you may find yourself using certain members of your team less due to a dropped comment from someone like the pilot Joker, or your assistant Kelly. It’s amazing how quickly your attitudes can shift as you learn more about your team through these conversations. As with the first game you can pursue a romantic relationship with a crew member, but rather than two options there’s a whole bunch of people you can hop on the good foot and so the bad thing with. Many of these romantic interludes are actually quite intimate and emotional and deepen the relationships between characters. Some are downright weird and certain characters will definitely surprise you with amusing results. But all are far superior to the ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ side boob antics of the last game.

The paragon and renegade conversation options are still in there but the concept has been expanded to various moments in the gameplay. You’ll have numerous opportunities to hit the left trigger for a paragon option or the right trigger for a renegade option during the game and these decisions to act can have long reaching implications for the plot beyond boosting your stats. The options are rarely black and white as well. You’ll wrestle with doing the noble and just thing, even though you know doing the right thing could mean people you care about getting hurt. Or worse, someone might piss you off so badly you take the option to put a slug through their head even though they’re unarmed, you'll be surprised when it happens but some situations call for an impulsive reaction. Despite trying to play a ‘paragon playthrough’ on my first go at Mass Effect 2 I found myself taking several renegade options because of choices that made my moral compass spin. I can’t think of any game that has handled moral choices so well before. It’s as if Bioware wanted to screw with your head as payback for screwing their characters.

While your landing party is still restricted to two members, it will take some time to narrow down your favourites

Bioware have set out to streamline a lot of the gameplay and interface elements of the series but at times it seems they’ve cut too much, or replaced it with something I’m not super keen on. First up is the inventory interface, this has pretty much been binned all together. Characters have a weapon set that can be upgraded with new weapons of the same type (which happens automatically so you don’t even need to do that) but only Shepherd can have his armour upgraded. Now rather than finding suits of stat adjusting armour you can buy or research upgrades to parts of your armour, ie. legs, shoulders, and equip them from your locker in the captains cabin, which I didn’t even discover until a third of the way into the game. While the interface for equipping and using weapons, items and armour was fiddly and annoying I did enjoy that RPG main stay of swapping around equipment to suit my squad and give them the best setup. I’m sure other RPG freaks miss it as well.

I will admit that stripping out the RPG elements has refocused the action on actually shooting up your enemies which is oodles of fun. The gameplay has been made a little tougher and your shields fall a lot quicker to sustained gun fire and you’re attacked by far greater numbers of enemies now than you have been before. This means an increased reliance on your team mates and the special abilities available, not to mention duck and covering a lot. Fire fights are now far more tactical and interesting than they were in Mass Effect. The AI has been tweaked quite a bit so enemies are more likely to take cover and respond to their biggest threat making them harder to charge. Your ally’s are also less likely to stand next to you looking bored while getting shot at and actively move to their own piece of cover and try and flank the enemies. You can issue orders to move your team around and adjust a setting depending on whether you want them to use their most powerful abilities automatically, but mostly you’re better off just letting them do their thing. Some of your team mates are far better at taking out enemies than you are and you may find yourself popping from cover to see your Krogan ally take out the last of your enemies before you’ve even fired.

The rhino like Krogan are probably one of the most popular races and they play a big role in Mass Effect 2

One feature of Mass Effect that got a lot of complaint was the driving mechanic. Motoring around in your landing craft  the Mako was horrible to control and all too easy to die while exploring planets. So yes it has been completely cut from Mass Effect 2; but personally I really miss it. No question that controlling the landing craft was horrid but it gave you a scope and sense of adventure that really made you feel like a Star Trek like character exploring new worlds. The fact you had to hop out of your buggy and actually walk up to minerals to tag them or explore a crashed ship or alien settlement was exciting and a far better way of discovering a side quest than the system in Mass Effect 2. Now we have the terminally boring planet scanning mini game. You hold one trigger and slowly scroll over the planet you're scanning waiting for the mineral reader to spike, then launch a probe and get some minerals. When you run out of your inventory of thirty probes its back to the nearest galaxy with a gas station to stock up. Then back for more scanning. Each planet takes a good five minutes to scan well and every one in ten odd will have an anomaly, that indicates a side quest prompting you to land and investigate. Some of these missions take less time to complete than it took you to scan and find them. You don’t have to scan every single planet and you probably won’t, but if you want the resources to upgrade your weapons, armour and space ship you’ll need to do it more often than you’ll be able to stand.

On top of this lack of planet exploration the environments throughout much of the game feel snipped from the original. There isn’t a single environment that’s bigger than a few corridors and rooms and nothing approaching the size of the Citadel from the previous game. The version of the citadel in Mass Effect 2 is only a few floors and is about the size of your local Myers. Missions relating to these areas are at separate locations from the hub area. You head through a door and complete the mission section, then go back to your ship or the hub, never able to access that area again. For an RPG it has very small areas to explore and a restrictive and linear quest system. This annoyed me quite a bit when I got to visit locale’s like the Krogan homeworld or the nomadic Quarian fleet. The playable area was down to, as I said before, a few corridors and a few rooms.

Mass Effect 2 stretches above and beyond its predecessor in so many ways and feeds every science fiction junkies fantasies, probably creating a few along the way. It handles its place as a middle story in a trilogy well providing its own high and low points and setting the scene for the third instalment. While the RPG elements have been dumbed down it does feel like a sacrifice for the greater good, making the game more accessible and improving the pace over the original. Despite all the shooting and space exploration the heart of the game, the conversations and character relationships, are better than any your likely to find in another game, RPG or otherwise. You care about the characters far more than a healthy person should and the moral decisions are often very difficult to make. Rather than good and evil being an amusing coin flip it's a difficult and at times agonising choice to make, especially when you know it will impact the universe of the next game. Depending on the competition for the rest of the year Mass Effect 2 could be a January game of the year of the year winner.