Paul’s Top 10: Mass Effect 2

Written by Paul Lehman

Mass Effect 2 has been my automatic answer for my favorite video game of all time, and honestly, it’s very hard for me to imagine anything unseating it. When the original Mass Effect was released in 2007, I rented it from Blockbuster for my Xbox 360, and from the very first second I was absolutely transfixed. I’m not the hugest fan of sci-fi, but I was immediately intrigued by the opening text on the screen which explained that it was the year 2148 and that humans had discovered an artifact on Mars that fast-forwarded the development of technology. Long story short, the first game lets you see how humans discover the ability to travel faster than light, and the complexities of the politics between humans and the other alien races.

Commander Shepard is the stand-in for all of humanity, proving that the sheer will and determination of humanity is second to none. The story was fantastic, and the game forced you to make several decisions that felt monumental. Not only were several lives at stake over the course of the game but even the future of galactic politics. The climax of the game is when you face a Reaper, an advanced synthetic machine that is coordinating an attack with other Reapers to wipe out all organic life in the galaxy. In the final moments of the game, you decide whether or not to divert precious military resources to protect a ship carrying the Citadel Council or to continue pressing the attack against the Reaper.

Saving the Council is clearly the “right” choice, but the Council is also made up of alien races who have refused to believe your accounts of the Reapers and have stalled the installation of the first human on the Council. The game ends rather abruptly and left me thirsty for more. My first playthrough was fully Paragon and I saved the Council. The same day I completed the game, I started a new playthrough and decided that I would go full Renegade and let the Council die. I played it again and again and again, and I am not even sure how many full playthroughs I have. My best guess is that I have beaten the game about 14 times.

Then in 2010, Mass Effect 2 arrived. My expectations were unobtainably high. It’s easy to set the stage for drama. Learning that the Reaper threat existed was thrilling. Humanity and the rest of the galaxy had to use all their might just to destroy one Reaper. How can we possibly survive against the thousands on their way? We knew that Mass Effect would be a trilogy, so the Reaper threat will not be fully seen until Mass Effect 3…how is Mass Effect 2 going to compete with the initial intrigue of the first while waiting for the final showdown of the third? Somehow between the three entries, Mass Effect 2 ended up being the best one. The developer, BioWare, took some huge chances by overhauling major components of gameplay and story. The game opens where an unknown alien species attacks Commander Shepard and the rest of the crew of the Normandy, causing them to abandon ship. While helping the last crew member escape, Commander Shepard gets blasted into space and dies.

We see an extended cutscene introducing us to one of the best gaming characters to ever exist, The Illusive Man.

The Illusive Man leads an organization called Cerberus, whose mission is to elevate humanity over the other alien species by any means necessary. That means terrorism, scientific experimentation, and subterfuge are all on the table. The Illusive Man understands that Commander Shepard was not just a great soldier, but a symbol of the strength of humanity, and their best hope at stopping the impending Reaper invasion. They retrieve Commander Shepard’s body and begin The Lazarus Project, a two-year project with an ungodly amount of funding to bring back Shepard from the dead. The project is successful, and over the course of the game, you will try to figure out where your loyalties lie and who you can trust. You literally owe your second life to Cerberus, and you have a common goal of defeating the Reapers, but Shephard knows better than to place blind trust into The Illusive Man. When you are first woken up, you find out that the Cerberus ship is under attack, and you have your first experience with combat.

The game teaches you how to shoot, and it’s immediately apparent that the combat system was entirely overhauled. The old clunky system from Mass Effect 1, featuring guns without ammo that overheat over time, was replaced by a modern feeling system with regular ammunition and the need to reload. Enemies often have shields or biotic barriers that provide resistance to certain weapon types, forcing you to cycle through the weapons at your disposal. The skill tree was paired down into a simple and easy-to-understand system which more easily allows you to see all your options. You also achieve major bonuses when you max out one of your abilities, giving you a real sense of upgrade over the course of the campaign. My favorite playthroughs have involved my Shepard going the Vanguard route, balling up into a cannonball that can shoot into an enemy, and then blasting them with a shotgun at point-blank range.

During my first playthrough, I fell in love with nearly all of my companions. Some old faces show back up, like Garrus, Tali, and Liara, but we are also introduced to some of the most fascinating side characters I’ve ever encountered in Thane, Jack, and Mordin.

Thane Krios, Drell assassin

Thane is an alien who was groomed to be an assassin since the age of six. Despite killing targets for a living, Thane is also a deeply spiritual man, praying over the body of each person he has killed. On top of that, he has grown distant from his son Kolyat and is also dying from a disease called Kepral’s Syndrome. A side mission allows you to help Thane reconnect with Kolyat, and to provide advice to Kolyat as he considers becoming an assassin as well. The complex dynamics of their father-son relationship along with the ticking clock of Thane’s disease is a storyline that is moving and hard to shake.

Jack, also known as Subject Zero, powerful biotic criminal

We also encounter Jack, a powerful biotic user who appears to be a psychopath. She is locked away on a ship that serves as a prison, which is perfect because no one can escape. It’s essentially Alcatraz in space. After recruiting her to join your crew, Jack tells us of her past, being a prisoner of Cerberus at one of their research facilities. She remembers being tortured as a child and used in experiments for the betterment of Cerberus. She wishes to return to the base where she was held captive and to blow it to smithereens. While accompanying her to the abandoned base, and learning more about the situation, we learn that Jack’s perception of her predicament was not quite as it seemed. As we all know, memory and perception are flawed, and these revelations cause Jack to re-evaluate what she’s been through.

Mordin Solus, Salarian scientist who believes the ends justify the means

And then there’s Mordin Solus. I’ve never seen a character quite like him. While on the way to meet Mordin for the first time, we’re told that he’s a doctor who is just as likely to kill someone as to heal them. Mordin confirms this later when we meet him and he says, “Lots of ways to help people. Sometimes heal patients; sometimes execute dangerous people. Either way helps.” As we learn more about his background, we see that he has devoted his life to this principle in rather radical ways. When a powerful and aggressive alien race called the Krogan started to spread quickly around the galaxy and were annexing entire planets from other alien species, Mordin worked with a secret team of scientists to create the Genophage, an infection that spreads amongst all the Krogan to lower their birth rates to keep their population in check. The Genophage is even more horrific than it sounds - Krogan females still become pregnant at the same rate, but their babies are stillborn 99.9% of the time. Mordin has no remorse for the creation of this bioweapon because he viewed it as the only solution to protect the galaxy as a whole.

This all sounds rather heavy, but Mordin also provides some of the best comic relief you could ever ask for. Plus, he has a beautiful singing voice.

Eventually, you’re told by Mordin that his protege Maelon has been kidnapped by Krogan mercenaries. After investigating the situation, it turns out that Maelon has been working voluntarily with the Krogan to develop a cure for the Genophage. There are dead bodies everywhere as a result of the experimentation, highlighting how desperate the Krogan are to find a cure. As Mordin finds himself face-to-face with some of the unintended consequences of his decisions, he starts to feel a sense of guilt over what he has done. These kinds of moral quagmires are some of my favorite aspects of Mass Effect. Just like in the real world, not everything is black and white. You can often sympathize with multiple characters who are on opposite ends of the spectrum on a moral issue, and the series does a fantastic job of making you understand each character’s thought process and motivations. The conclusion of Mordin’s storyline in Mass Effect 3 is a subject for another article, but it is beautiful, thought-provoking, and heartbreaking.

So let’s check the score. Fantastic storytelling? Check. Modern overhaul of combat to make it feel modern? Check. Emotional and intriguing side missions and side characters? Check. Difficult decisions that lead to natural conclusions that you see play out? Check. And yet we haven’t even addressed the true apex of the game. The suicide mission.

Without getting bogged down in too many details, at the end of Mass Effect 2, Commander Shepard and company are going to engage in what they acknowledge is a suicide mission. An alien race known as the Collectors have allied themselves with the Reapers, and you have the opportunity to launch an offensive attack on them. This seemed a little cliché at first, but then I suddenly realized how my previous decisions were starting to play out before me. Over the course of the game, as you complete loyalty side missions for your crewmates, they start to suggest modifications that might improve the Normandy’s performance. Like any good completionist gamer, I had completed every side mission and purchased every upgrade. As the Normandy engages with the Collectors, I got to see how those upgrades kept my crewmates alive. After surviving the initial encounter, the crew is dropped off on foot, and Commander Shepard starts to devise how the infiltration attack will go so that the Collector base can be destroyed.

The epic music sets the stage, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. The crew works together and identifies parts of the attack that need to be addressed. One crewmate will need to crawl through thermal vents and hack the computers to open and close doors. If you know your crew well, you know which ones excel with tech and which ones don’t. You have to make the call as the Commander, and then see whether or not they will succeed in their mission and whether or not they will survive. There are other decisions as well: Who do you trust to lead a secondary squad to serve as a diversion? Who is a natural leader and who will the second team be willing to follow? Who will serve next to you on the first team? Which biotic user will provide shields for your unit as you cross through the base?

I cannot overemphasize how much adrenaline this pumped into my bloodstream on my first playthrough. Most games just simply place you in front of a boss with a huge HP meter and let you fight. This was different. The strategies and decisions were more difficult than any boss I ever faced. I knew I had the fate of my crewmates in my hands, and I desperately wanted to save them all through the experience. Making several decisions and then having to wait and see how it would play out removed the possibility of save scrubbing, so I made sure to take my time and think through all my decisions. The final results can range from keeping the entire crew alive to having everyone, including Shephard, killed except for Joker, the Normandy’s pilot.

All of this might beg the question, “So what about Mass Effect 3?” Mass Effect 3 deserved a lot of the criticism it received in regard to the ending. However, the first 85% of Mass Effect 3 is just as good as Mass Effect 2. To put it into football terms, yes, the quarterback threw an interception for a pick-six in the 4th quarter, but their team still had a resounding 42-10 victory.

Every so often I get a hankering to play Mass Effect. I’m always faced with a few conundrums - do I start a full playthrough of the full trilogy, or do I jump straight into Mass Effect 2 to hit all the good stuff? Do I even have the time to invest in another playthrough or should I just watch the famous Commander Shepard is Still A Jerk video on YouTube to experience the humor and Renegade side of the game?

At the end of the day, I can only hold off the siren’s song for so long. I always return for a full playthrough every year or two. Your mileage may vary, but for me, this game just hits on every single cylinder. If you haven’t experienced this masterpiece of a series, do yourself a favor and pick it up, and let yourself get fully immersed into the world and experience. You’ll experience joy, grief, interest, confusion, victory, and loss. No other game has given me the full human experience like Mass Effect 2, which is why it’s my favorite game of all time.