The Good: Great "choose your own adventure" type of story, interesting and likeable cast of characters, combat is really fun, controls function well, awesome graphics, amazing atmosphere, superb voice acting.
The Bad: A little too "cover system" heavy, the "jump over cover" controls could be done better, occasional annoying glitches.
Mass Effect 2 is one of the biggest games out there and it's not hard to see why. It's huge! All the branching stories, the huge worlds, it's all what defines an epic game. But the question is, do I like it?
In this game, you play as Shepard, who, during an attack in space, becomes mostly dead (Princess Bride pun). He gets brought back to life by some kind of medicine or something. He (or she) must build up a team of soldiers to take down the evil Collectors. Okay, now onto the review.
The story, or should I say "stories", is great. Every small decision you make affects how the story goes, which is pretty cool! The game also goes Star Wars on you, making you choose either the Paragon route (light side) or Renegade route (dark side). These give great changes to the story and personality of you character. What also helps the stories is the fact that the characters are all interesting. Doing their separate missions and learning their back stories is awesome!
Combat is fun. They're intense and control well. It's not quite fast paced, but it is intense because you never know when they will attack. Any and every enemy can and will kill you. My only complaint about combat is that it focuses a little too much on the cover system, but it's only a small complaint.
There's only one part of the controls I have a problem with: jumping over the cover. Getting into cover and going over cover respond to the same button, except going over makes you press it twice. It can be a little nonresponsive at times. It doesn't happen a lot, but it can be frustrating when you can't leap over cover and all you want to do is advance through the level.
The graphics are really, really good. Everything breathes life and is so beautifully executed, even though they don't look necessarily realistic (which isn't a bad thing). The whole atmosphere is breathtaking. Every planet you visit is big and has lots to see, lots to explore. I actually like visiting other planets more than I do actually fighting people.
The music score is superb. Every song perfectly fits the situation (even though almost every song is used during combat (which is also not a bad thing)). They really help the mood, make you feel at edge. It's awesome!
The voice acting is excellent. Every character has the perfect voice, perfect personality, perfect tone. It possibly has some of the best voice acting in all of gaming. Lots of characters have voice acting and all of them are great, even the characters that you're just passing by while on a planet.
Yes, there are some glitches. Usually, they are small ones, like the sound getting off timing with the graphics, a character randomly disappears and then reappears again, you know, that sort of thing. But on occasion, these can really get annoying. One time, I was in a really tough fight where I died about 10 times. At the tenth try, when I was shooting someone. The game froze. Everything stopped working except for the music. This has only happened once to me, thankfully. Like I said, most glitches aren't bad, but they are annoying.
Overall, this game is great. I love the story. The atmosphere, graphics, controls, voice acting, and all the stuff you can do are great. The few annoyances, like the glitches, cover controls, over-focus on cover system, are hardly going to lower my score at all. I'm not even close to being done with it, and I'm excited to see how it ends. This could be one of the greatest RPGs ever created.