General review - Streamlined and polished compared to the first. Character models look brilliant and many of the animations are excellent, and of course the art direction and design is where the real genius is. Many cool characters with their own strengths, weaknesses and unique story. A solid follow up to the first.
Critical review - Ultimately Bioware played it safe with ME2. Many of the intricacies from the first, instead of being expanded upon, were removed. While many things looked great, many of the environments were, graphically, average and in some cases sub-par. The RPG elements such as leveling up characters and equipment has been marginalized to the point where it is not even necessary for completion of game.
About 1/3 of the way through I thought it was the greatest game I had ever played. 2/3 the way through the game fell into: find friend, do friend mission, try to have sex with friend. I become disappointed and then all of a sudden a new universe opened up, and I started to think: Amazing, the first half was getting your team together and the second half was going to be the real story. Ummm . . . nope
For me the dialogue choices always seemed obvious and when it came to having sex with or killing someone off, I knew which choice to make. I read a lot of books though . . .
8/10
