Mass Effect 2

Saren and the Sovereign have been defeated and the Citadel has been saved. Depending on the player's choices made in the first Mass Effect, humanity may be all that's left of the Citadel Council. Of course that doesn't keep them from ignoring the former war-hero Shepard who knows that the threat from the Reapers is still real. Instead they send him or her on a boring mission to find some Geth in the Terminus system. The inevitable happens: a new enemy enters the scene, destroys Shepard's ship, the Normandy and kills the hero of the galaxy. End of game?

No, not really. Cerberus, a known right-wing network, believes the threat from the Reapers to be real and only sees one chance of saving the human race: Shepard. So they invest millions upon millions of credits into the Lazarus project, and two years after Shepard died floating in space, he (she) reawakens on-board the Cerberus Station. The main mission given by Cerberus: find out more about the mysterious race of Collectors who abduct millions of human colonists for an unknown purpose, and figure out their possible connection to the Reapers.

Mass Effect 2 is a hybrid of third-person-shooter and role-playing game. Fighting is done in a Gears of War-like fashion, with the characters being able to storm into cover and look out to get in a few shots. In addition, health and shield energy are regenerated automatically if the protagonist or his squad mates avoid being hit for a few seconds. The weapons now require ammunition which is either dropped by killed enemies or scattered around the level, but there are only two types: one for the heavy weapons and one for all others.

Besides the combat, the second most important part of the game are the multiple-choice dialogues. The decisions the player makes here heavily influence the players path deciding if he will become a bad or a good person. To that end not only the dialogue choices are sorted by good, neutral and bad but special dialogue options are available for each path if the player has enough points in it that can end a dialogue prematurely to the heroes favor. Quick-time events have been introduced, where the player can perform an alignment action independent from his current path, such as hitting an obnoxious reporter in the face to shut her up.

One of the most important features of Mass Effect 2 is the ability to import a character from the first game. While the character itself including class and appearance can still be changed at the beginning of the game, he will get a huge bonus both in credits, experience points and minerals at the start of the game depending on the character level he had at the end. In addition, hundreds of decisions the player made in the first game will have an impact on more or less important parts of Mass Effect 2. This includes the state of the universe at the beginning of the game, which romances the player pursued and which of his squad mates died or survived the end as well as minor decisions like the survival of the Rachni queen. If Shepard survives the end of Mass Effect 2, the player will be able to carry him over to Mass Effect 3, too.