It's hard to watch television these days without being hammered with ads for the second installment in BioWare's space-loving, alien-sexing, sci-fi action-RPG series, Mass Effect. In fact, one of the most striking things about Mass Effect 2 is how/why Electronic Arts is standing so heavily behind it. The advertising campaign has been relentless, blanketing a number of different networks and demographics. Having now finished the game, it's clear why.

Mass Effect 2 transcends genre expectations. It's not just a cut-and-dry role-playing-game with a sci-fi skin to it. If you want it to be a third-person shooter, it's a third person shooter. If you want it to be a team-oriented, tactical RPG, it can be that, too. If you want it to be a story-driven continuation of ME1's adventure to save a universe on the precipice of decimation at the hands of an alien race, well, it's that as well. Indeed the most ambitious aspect of ME2 is how malleable its various play-styles can be while still falling under the umbrella of dense science fiction filled with meaningful relationships and storylines.

That ambition, however, is also its weak spot. In an attempt to make a product that could be marketed to a bigger swath of gamers, BioWare inadvertently lost sight of what made the first Mass Effect a resounding triumph; mainly that it was a totally geeked out RPG that played perfectly to the customize-everything wants of RPG players. ME2, on the other hand, is a bit more linear in its attempt to appeal beyond the RPG consumer base.

Don't get me wrong, Mass Effect 2 is still an outstanding game and a must-play for fans of sci-fi, but it's a bit of a disappointment for fans of RPGs. Gone are the extensive means of character customization, dynamic leveling, and, most notably, the subtleties of cause-and-effect. Nuance is replaced with a straight-forward means of progression that, for an old-school RPG player, feels arbitrary. Sure, you can import your character save file from ME1 or you can create a new Commander Shepard, deciding his background and skill class from the get go, but beyond deciding the general framework of your abilities at the outset of the game, there's really no consequence to how you decide to level your character.


This is due to a newly revamped combat system designed to make the fairly complex one ME used accessible to genre newbies. In their attempt to appeal to the cover-and-fire system popularized by Gears of War, they've made the fighting portions of the game relatively point-and-click affairs. This isn't to say that combat is boring or easy - it's still fun and you'll still see the death screen often enough to get occasionally frustrated - it's just simple. I never once found the need to customize the armor or guns of myself or my team throughout the entire game. That's a rather drastic tactical drop off from ME1, which constantly required you to change not only your armor and guns, but your ammo and upgrades as well. These systems are still present in ME2 in a reduced form, but they have zero impact on how challenging the game is.

The only real sense of consequence in the game is whether or not you run through the narrative as either a Paragon or a Renegade, but even the new system governing this doesn't live up to its full potential. Whether you decide to act like a benevolent savior, the universe's biggest badass, or a mixture of the two does have a noticeable outcome on the game and how NPCs perceive your character. However, the 'full potential' complaint arises out of the fact that there's no question as to whether your good or bad actions are going to yield a result.

Take the dialogue system from Fallout 3 for an example of a truly dynamic RPG experience. Your ability to lie to someone depends on a number of factors in F3, all of which the game takes into consideration, in turn giving you a statistical chance to be successful. This brand of system makes you think twice about whether you want to take on risky behavior as there is a chance it will backfire. There is no risk in ME2, however. Path-altering dialogue is color coded by its moral direction and there is no doubt as to whether or not you will succeed, reducing all of the player's decisions to basically, "Be nice" or "Be a dick".

Yet I realize that's a rather specific complaint that most players won't even care about. Even I am forgiving of this lack of risk because the writing team at BioWare did such an outstanding job of branching out the paths of right and wrong that the player can't help but feel the weight of their actions. Play things too fast and loose and characters, sometimes important ones, will die. This alone goes light years to compensate for the otherwise arbitrary player customization as it will be exceedingly easy to have multiple playthroughs with completely different outcomes.

As for my own initial playthrough (on the PC, by the way), I logged 19hours and 12 minutes before the credits signaled the end of ME2's core narrative. For me, that's long enough to feel satisfied while still being short enough to encourage a more casual second run to see how the opposite moral path, namely not being a dick to everyone in the known universe, turns out.

And you'll want to revisit it. You'll want to spend more time with the excellent voice cast (which includes the familiar tones of Keith David, Seth Green, Martin Sheen, Yvonne Strahovski, Michael Hogan, and Tricia Helfer) and the characters they play. You'll want to explore areas and complete side quests you didn't make time for the first time. You'll want to live in the game's universe all over again. Nitpicking aside, at the end of the day, that quality is the ultimate decider of how good an RPG is. Mass Effect 2 may not be as robust on the customization front as ME, but it eventually proves no poorer an experience for it.