14 DAY TRIAL // Mass Effect 2 has finally been released, and it doesn't take more than three minutes and 12 seconds to get sucked into the game, play for hours on end and forget that you have to get up early in the morning to get to work, and you thus end up being late. Hypothetically speaking. As such, while there are plenty of gameplay details that I could lay on you, this edition of "A First Look At" is going to be a very brief one, since the first hour of gameplay is more than enough to blow your mind away, out and airlock and into outer space.
Speaking of which, spoilers ahead, that's how the game starts, with Commander Shepard being blown into space and dying. A mysterious ship that, with enough intuition and inside information, we can guess belongs to the Collectors, appears out of nowhere and attacks the Normandy, tearing it to bits. While Joker evades their attacks long enough for the majority of the crew to make it to the escape pods, his Vrolik syndrome crooked-legs need Shepard to carry him to one, and while Joker ends in a rescue pod, Shepard gets hit by the blast of an explosion, damages his suit and gets thrown into the dead, cold space.
Two years pass in the blink of an eye, and the universe changes, but it does so according to the decisions you made in your original Mass Effect game and the save file you imported, so if this doesn't add up to your gameplay experience, don't point any accusing fingers at me. The council is dead, Captain Anderson is part of the new Council, and while Sovereign has been destroyed, in spite of the captain's efforts to convince the world of the opposite, everyone believes that the Reapers are nothing but a myth, and that the Sovereign is an isolated incident.
But human colonies are beginning to disappear completely, leaving behind not a single colonist, just empty buildings and a thousand questions, while the Alliance pays little attention to these edge-of-space disappearances. The only one that is trying to do something is Cerberus (yes, this is where BioWare's Cerberus Network comes from), an extremist pro-human organization that's regarded by the universe as a borderline-terrorist one. Cerberus knows about the Collectors, and believes in the Reapers, but, most importantly, it believes in Shepard.
In a "We have the technology. We can rebuild him" scenario, Cerberus stitches Shepard back together and brings him to life, but with the scars to prove his past. These scars will be influenced by your Paragon/Renegade behavior, in a physical-appearance system influenced by your moral choices, similar tot the one in KOTOR 2.
Awaken early by a terrorist attack, Shepard finds himself two years into the future, with his crew scattered, everyone believing that he is dead and that all he fought against, namely the Reapers, is a ghost story. Teaming up with Cerberus, the only ones willing to accept the Reaper menace, Shepard is joined by Miranda Lawson and Jacob Taylor, two Cerberus operatives, and is tasked with building a team that can fight the Reapers.
The combat system of ME2 is far more aggressive and frantic than in the previous game. Weapons use thermal clips instead of passive cooling, which pretty much counts as the classic weapon ammo. Special powers have a cool down of just a few seconds, but they have a global one, so when you use one, they all go down. Weapons no longer have skill specialization and we can only equip our class-designed weapons. The special ammo that was once a weapon mod is now a skill and lasts until the end of the mission or until it's overwritten by another ammo skill. Medigel is no longer used to restore your health points, but it's used as a regent for Unity, as health is regenerative for all classes.
The rest of the ME2 impressions will follow in the coming days, via gaming journals, as the story progresses and, hopefully, if the gods permit it, allowing us to provide you with a full review this Friday.