Bought Mass Effect 1 and 2 in the Steam Sale.
Got perfect ending in MAss Effect 2.
Strengths of Mass Effect:
Extremely well crafted universe.
The Paragon/Renegade is something I hold up as a true morality system. It's not simply good or evil, more Compassionate Helper Hero or Pragmatic if Racist Anti-Hero.
The plot is very engaging.
Virmire
Lots of other stuff
Weaknesses:
The shooting is just bad.
Loot system is needless, tedious and hopelessly dated.
Same goes for the "Pick your permanent class before you even know what they ARE" system
A little too talky in places, but necessarily so to establish said universe.
Neutral choices are worthless unless you're going all Paragon/Renegade (I'm Paragade).
Upgrade system has a lot of choices, but there's very little noticeable impact with upgrades.
Strengths of Mass Effect 2:
Dynamic Endings
TIM
Loyalty missions give great character development and help you connect much closer to the characters.
Shooting is much, much better. Now you aren't essentially limited to only ever using one type of gun.
The refined HUB system keeps the tangible size of the world while also avoiding having the programmers actually make decent vehicle physics.
Planet scanning can potentially add to immersion with the right mindset.
Upgrades have much more impact, but the small AMOUNT of potential upgrades mean you don't have much room for alternate class builds. Reduces the game from Action RPG to Action Game with notable RPG elements.
Thane's Voice.
Other stuff
Weaknesses:
Planet scanning is fucking awful if you can't put yourself in a good mindset.
While the plot itself was fun what with the "Build a team of misfits together to perform a suicide mission (And prove them wrong)", it didn't feel like it did much for the overall arc aside from add some cool characters and bridge between ME1's "We have to prevent the Reaper invasion's normal method" and ME3's (Assumed as I will not pay $60 for a fucking digital game) "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"
Game felt a little too easy and afraid to throw meaty hordes at you.
Jacob is boring
While I do not mind the "Do some cover based shooting relevant to plot then more plot and dialogue choices" system, the lack of any real gameplay aside from the cover-based shooting made the game feel a little token.
From what I can tell, most of the DLC is stuff that was supposed to be in the main game but was cut. Whether solely to make it DLC or for legitimate time concerns, I'd prefer to not know.
My FemShep also harbors guilt over
- Spoiler: show
- Having the Alliance fleet focus on Sovereign and abandoning the Council to die. It was a bad situation and Sovereign was too much of a threat to divert fire power away from it. In a situation like that, from a realistic perspective you couldn't be sure having half the fleet focus on geth instead would have left enough man power to kill Soveriegn. Shepard decided to put the galaxy itself first, but now the galaxy resents her as it is apparent she could have had her cake and eaten it as well.
:(
Will do opinions on Mass Effect 3 when EA pulls their head out of its ass and realizes the point of Digital Distribution is that you can sell more games for cheaper prices than physical retail and make more profit.
Arby
