Yesterday I noticed there is a demo for Mass Effect 2 out there.
Never knew that. I must have missed it, somhow …
Well, anyway, I installed it, and played through the first "chpter" of it.
The *really* bad thing with it is, that the plot of the first game is told in the beginning. summarized, but complete. What kind of moron made this up ???
Now I'm spoiled. Yes. It's as if EA or Bioware explicitely wanted me to keep away from ME1 and never ever play it, to put it more sarcastically.
Well, I found the demo quite … irritating in some points. The UI strongly reminded me of Homeworld, and of what I saw of Deus Ex 3.
The "dialogue wheel" which apparingly has already become some sort of "industry standard", because the "Fairy" RPG has it as well, is there, too.
It uses so short words like "investigation", and the character DOES NOT say the word "investigation" to his companion ! - I already criticised this for the Dragon Age 2 demo, because these words are just too short - and imho too unclear - resulting in the character chosing words that NOT I have chosen, but the designrs - this is a failure to me, because I believe the player should still have the right to
properly chose which lines he or she wants to use within the game …
This "dialogue wheel" with its abbreviated words is like … giving me a dish with in opaque soup in it, and the waiter says to me : "Soup". Or at least "Tomato soup", without specifying what's in it at all (there could be ingredients an allergic person cannot "stomach", so to say, but the plain description of "Soup" doesn't tell me that).
In general, I found the HUD very … impractical. I had to extend my fingers over the keyboard (although I as already using WASD ("WhAt iS iD ?"
), and having to pause the game and manually click on the items I wanted to use didn't quite work for me in the pseudo-"tutorial" - apart from my drone not flying at all (I suspect because the pseudo-Tutorial didn't want me to).
In short : I found the HUD clumsy and didn't like it at all.
The fate of the player character reminded me strongly of Darth Vader at the end of "Revenge Of The Sith" - same body injures. So, argueing from that point of, if there ever was an Darth Vader RPG out there, Mr. Vader would have to start from leven 1 as well …
I hope everything I wrote here was more or less clear - sometimes I wasn't quite sure how to express my thoughts in he English language.
I still plan to buy ME1 one day - but not very soon, after this (personal) fiasco.