PS3/Xbox 360/PC; �49.99; cert 18+; Bioware/EA
PlayStation space marines, you can cancel your defection to a rival console planet: Mass Effect has come to PS3. This re-release of the previously Xbox and PC-only RPG comes ahead of the multi-platform arrival of Mass Effect 3 this winter, which means that Sony types have got most of the year to get the hang of being Commander Shepard on a universe-saving mission.
Reckon that's enough time? Wait until you've tried the game: deep like a black hole and with a similarly powerful gravitational hold on you, Mass Effect 2 is the kind of life-devouring entity that Shepard would usually be trying to dispatch from the nearest airlock.
Mass Effect 2 launches mid-action, with a breath-catchingly dramatic disaster on the SSV Normandy. It looks terrific ? there's a noticeble step up in the quality of the graphics from Xbox to PS3 ? and the game almost immediately gives you a perfect sci-fi moment. As Shepard heads to the bridge to rescue the pilot, Joker, you enter an area where the hull has been breached and the Normandy is open to space. Stars shine hard through the vacuum, the sound drops back to Shepard's ragged breathing, and there's no doubt at all that this is about you facing off against the vastness and emptiness of space.
Actually, it's not quite true that ME2 starts mid-action: to help out newcomers to the series, there's a DLC section that lets you make some of the choices that would have formed your character in the first Mass Effect. PC and Xbox players had the option to import the Shepard they made and nurtured in the first game (ME is big on customisation and permanence), so the DLC is some compensation for that.
But even if you choose to skip it and head straight to the main story, you'll still get to fiddle around with your Shepard's abilities and appearance until you make something you're happy with (or, possibly, something that looks so unsettlingly like yourself that you have to go back and start all over again). Shep can be male or female, a crack soldier or a biotics (that's psychic powers) expert, a war hero or a fractured sole survivor of a previous campaign ? it's all up to you, and as you proceed through the story, you'll make more choices that contribute to your "Paragon" or "Renegade" status and influence the way other characters react to you.
The DLC also gives you the chance to bone up on the story, so newcomers don't need to spend all their in-game conversations for the first two hours flicking the dialogue options to "investigate" and getting the other characters to give you some exposition. (Short story: all organic life in the universe is under threat from something called the Reapers, and Shepard has been resurrected by human supremacist group Cerberus to lead the world-saving effort. How much faith you put in a group that's official considered a terrorist outfit, and its sinister leader the Illusive Man, is entirely your decision.)
Not that you'll ever regret stopping to chat. Mass Effect 2 is populated with some of the most engaging, well-acted space people you could hope to meet, and the script has been carefully designed to make clunking non-sequiturs a vanishingly rare occurrence. As you tour planets and space stations, assembling a crack team of galaxy saviours and meeting all manner of strange and sometimes sexy aliens, you'll also find endless sidequests and subplots to get drawn into. Even if you don't choose to take most of them on, their very existence helps to bolster the idea of the Mass Effect world as a functioning universe.
Because that's what makes Mass Effect 2 great. Not the outstanding action, the compelling story, the huge depth of interaction, or any of the other ways in which the game demonstrates its outrageous surfeit of quality. It's because this is a game so coherent, you start to believe that you could actually live in it. Which is a good thing, because you'll almost certainly end up doing so.
? Game reviewed on PS3
Amanda Peet Xenia Seeberg The Avatars of Second Life Daniella Alonso Gina Gershon
No comments:
Post a Comment