Mass Effect 2 – quick impressions

+ a lot of dialogues, and well done in multiple languages (useful for me in learning french and german)

+ pretty big story

- the music is often quite generic (lack of themes/soul/feeling and instead often semi-random orchestral noises), and sometimes even distracting pausing in cinematics strangely

+ a lot of different worlds, each with nice bystander stories as bystanders talk

- but they’re often very linear

- it’s a very army-like story. I was looking forward to playing a character but instead it’s a very “for the team” type military experience, all in a pretty generic ‘the universe is in danger’ type of story (reminds me personally of Halo stuff)

+ they make some nice attempts at sci-fi tv type cinematics

+ dialogue choices are nice, though the morality system is pretty simple, 2 sided… though it did have the occasional nice moral grey choice that made me think!

Am I looking forward to ME3? Not particularly. Military experiences are a dime a dozen. I play rpgs for the worlds to explore, and in this game like in ME1 the open world seems to me more of an illusion, everything feels scripted and linear (yeah, sure, you can choose the order, but still feels constrained). The world doesn’t feel alive. And most importantly I didn’t feel so much it was MY experience, it was Sheppard’s. I was just going through the motions. A few times I was hoping they’d indeed enable me to find and explore galaxies, to discover planets and interesting things, but instead I found just mini-games and no real or interesting out-of-main-story places worth visiting or discovering. Okay, so i may seem like i’m totally criticizing the game, I’m not really: obviously I only finish good games, others I just abandon or don’t even start, and indeed this game has very high production values… it’s just that I had much higher expectations of a RPG (really playing your OWN character), particularly one that teases you wit ha whole universe, planets and galaxies… you think you’re gonna actually go and explore planets… not really :P