There will be spoilers.

I’ll start off by stating I think the game is fairly good. Great? No. Worth $60 (plus tax)? Err … possibly. Game of the year? If EA and Bioware pony up more toys to game reviewers than Microsoft does when Halo: Reach comes out, probably. (GT5 would get ‘game of the year’ by default for finally releasing … but it won’t … so, no worries there.)

The bulk of my frustration is that I can see where this, could’ve been a truly great game instead of a mediocre game cloaked in a shroud of game reviewer hype declaring it a great game. It’s the same frustration I’ve had with Bioware games since KOTOR (although I have fond memories of KOTOR that would likely be dashed if I played it now); they focus too much on the voice acting and leave the quest and level design to rot. I have to say though, for the NPC specific missions they did some work on level design. But once you’re in it, just the same one-track corridor with random crates / barriers to hide behind. It feels, and is, forced. Same with the enemies. You get the same basic set of things to shoot at, dressed in different textures. Some of the side quests are unique, but unfortunately few are epic. I’d like to see a lot less go-here-do-this quests and more unique investigate-explore epic sideline quests to keep the game interesting. I know the idea is to keep the player engaged so that they don’t notice that the main plot line of the game only lasts four hours, but would it be that difficult to have two or three arching quests, in addition to the main plot, instead of a bunch of ‘fedex’ quests?

My next frustration: the mini-game. Come on, this isn’t 1997 anymore. The mini-game-as-in-game-action is the ‘Who Let The Dogs Out’ of video games. The first time you have to pick the matching code sequence to hack a PDA, or match the symbols to bypass a security door, or move the scanner around to find the minerals on the planet isn’t so bad. By the fifteenth, sixteenth time, its old and wearying. By the middle of the game you quit bothering unless you absolutely have to. This kind of stuff is just crap, and I want to know which experienced game producer decided it was a good idea. Sure it pads the ‘game experience’ but it’s just awful. It’s damn close to ending a story with, ‘he woke and it discovered it had all been a dream.’ I mean really?!? You couldn’t have come up with something a little more engaging to the player?

The only part I found even the least bit satisfying was starting a scan of a planet (a tedious operation where you move the ‘scanner’ around on screen via the joystick and watch a line graph move / feel the controller vibrate when it registers minerals for you to then launch a probe … how a probe is physically able to mine, process, refine and deliver the minerals to your ship I’m not quite sure.) registering Rich and then leaving it Depleted when I was done. Intergalactic strip mining FTW! Is it a clever stab at greenies? Is it just stupid? Take your pick I guess.

I’m glad the little rover (that wasn’t physically big enough to fit three characters inside) missions are gone. But did you have to replace them with a shuttle that looks like a retarded dog trying to lay down when it lands?

Being that I like dungeon crawl loot collecting games I was a bit disappointed that there aren’t many new items to discover in ME2. Instead they replaced the inventory system with upgrades. I appreciate what they were trying to do, adventure games do tend to get tedious when you’re managing NPC inventories. Having NPCs manage their own inventories and the player being responsible for their own would’ve been more satisfying instead of having item collecting ripped out. Tediously mining resources in a mini-game so that I can afford to upgrade doesn’t seem like it adds much value, instead trading one time sink for another.

So what do I like about ME 2? I like that the conversation dialog isn’t as tedious as Dragon Age. I like the universe they’ve created. I like that I have a different game besides Modern Warfare 2 to play.