Mass Effect 2 - Retrospective @ EuroGamer

EuroGamer goes back in time with Mass Effect 2, finding it one of Bioware's better games.

"Character is plot, plot is character," said F Scott Fitzgerald, though it's a guideline to which very few games adhere. Usually they focus on plot, either by metering it out as a series of objectives for the player to follow, or by cutting it up, mixing up the pieces and letting the player pick a handful out of a bag. Character, if it happens at all, does so somewhere down the line.

Even the mighty Mass Effect fell into this trap. Its story is all Spectres and Geth, Rachni and Thorians. It focuses on establishing a universe, and does so by laying out a complex and sometimes overwhelming buffet of lore. "The devs can't help letting you gorge on it - to a fault," wrote Tom Bramwell in his retrospective of the original. In this vast milieu of races, cultures, and organisations all at the mercy of some galaxy-eating threat, individuals got a little lost, and the game ended up feeling somewhat cold.

Mass Effect 2 changes all that. With the series' major mystery - the existence of the Reapers - unveiled in the first game, BioWare needed to find a new way to invest the player. So Mass Effect 2 strips back much of what slowed the first game down, and in doing so exposes the pink and tender flesh of character hidden amid all that lore.