Mass Effect 2

There’s still plenty of dialogue to wade through, but most exchanges are kept reasonably short and sweet this time around. Despite being an RPG, Mass Effect 2 will mostly feel like a third-person action game. The way you control your squad, dive for cover and shoot enemies feels more natural than in some dedicated shooting games.

Mass Effect 2 tries to keep progress interesting by mixing up game styles. As well as shooting, you’ll be exploring, seeking diplomatic solutions, forming relationships, making moral or political decisions and more. In all, the breadth of experience is pretty vast and when the story ends it’s more than likely you’ll want to return to explore the Mass Effect universe further.

That’s not to say that Mass Effect 2 is perfect. There are still one or two graphical glitches, but these are fairly minor. In some scenes, Shepard became stuck to a wall, requiring us to reload a previous save. Possibly more irritating are the planet-scanning sections of the game. These effectively replace the Mako landing craft sequences in the first game, which saw you driving around for ages looking for something that isn’t interesting in the first place.

This has now been replaced with a system where investigating an unknown planet entails selecting it from your Galaxy Map then scanning over its surface for signs of valuable deposits and anomalies. This is still a lengthy and mostly uninteresting diversion from the main game. The good news is that you aren’t obliged to scan every heavenly body in the Milky Way unless you want to fill your ship with resources for upgrading weapons and equipment.

So, it’s a slightly flawed masterpiece once again, but ultimately Mass Effect 2 succeeds far more frequently than it disappoints. And with high production values throughout, including a stellar voice cast, an excellent soundtrack and a highly polished visual design, Mass Effect 2 is a true epic that easily eclipses the first instalment.

Given how good the original was, that’s no mean achievement.