You went through that whole review without mentioning the characters at all

You and I look for different things in BioWare RPGs I think

I'm curious. Have you played the Baldur's Gate series, Khuutra?

I'm curious. Have you played the Baldur's Gate series, Khuutra?

Only a little, alas - not enough to familiarize myself with the characters therein.

yes! wait..... i'm not khuutra

You're missing out on BioWare's best game (BG2/ToB)... If it's quality of the characters, story, gameplay and longevity you like in games.

I highly recommend it.

There won't be much funny in this post sadly... Mass Effect 2 is probably my biggest gaming disappointment ever.

9

The Good

-Production values: The game has a solid audio/video experience and great alien art to boot.

-Performance: It runs at a solid clip on consoles, and my PC had no problems cranking out the max settings with some extra tweaks (high quality models all the time) at 45 FPS.

 -Good post-release support: Patches to improve stability, mini-games, Cerberus Network, and decent DLC are always a nice touch

-Final mission gave you a feeling of actually commanding with consequence

The Bad

-Stripped out the loot system and exploration: IMO these were the best things about the first game. Sure the loot management was crap, but the fact that there was loot and it was customizable was awesome. I was living out my sci-fi dreams while driving around on alien planets! They even took out the Citadel... Sure, no planets to explore... but not even the Citadel?

-The entire game is a side story arc that really goes nowhere. The climax (boss fight and mission of the Collectors) was complete turd on a stick. It was like the end of The Matrix: Path of Neo, except that game did it as a joke and acknowledged it as such. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMzpzX2s7T8

-The actions taken in the first game had little to no impact on this game. Things are mentioned or alluded to here or there, or a character model and voice are swapped... but that's it. They might come into play on the next game but it would've been nice to have at least one major decision come into play sooner.

-The characters are forgettable . Grunt is a shell of the awesomeness that Wrex was, Garrus was a lot less relevant than in the first game, and the new cast consisting of Jack, Miranda, Jacob, and Zaeed were either repulsive or useless. Tali, Thane, Legion, and Mordin were very well done but Legion got introduced into the game far too late.

The Ugly 

-I bought the Collectors Edition of this game on PC and was determined to not open it before finishing the final exams I was writing at the time. I ended up playing it through twice in the two weeks I was writing finals. Needless to say, that was my worst term mark-wise ever.

-The tears of disappointment I shed when I realized the game was not what I wanted at all. It has earned much of this high score out of sheer quality, rather than being fun. I think my affection for the first game also bleeds into this to get it to a 9. Otherwise I think it would be low 8 territory.

-Miranda's face

You know what? Screw it... 6. I give this title a 6. Good looks can only take you so far. Miranda's assets can attest to that.

6

9 is a fair score

Pros-

Gameplay is much smoother.

less loading times.

cons-

4-5 weapons only

mining

game feels more "closed"

3 missions where actual story is involved

o_O have you even played ME1? That game had exactly 4 weapons ,i know i know there where weapons with different stats, but at the end of the day there was 4 weapons since they all felt the same, they just did more damage or had less overheating. This game has 6 different weapon types and at least 3 different guns in every category. Power weapons got like 10.

The armors i guess you can complain about, since every squad mate got like 2 armors and Shepard got like 5 and 4 of those are DLC. But the weapons is an improvement.