Mass Effect was a huge hit when it was released in 2007, and gamers are itching to play the second installment into the franchise, Mass Effect 2, which is due for release towards the start of 2010.
Despite much speculation and the takeover of BioWare by EA, the game has maintained its Xbox 360 and PC exclusivity. Gaming Union recently had the opportunity to get some hands-on time with the Xbox 360 version of the game, which is sticking to its sci-fi Action RPG roots.
The premise for the demonstration was a simple fire fight in-between two short cutscenes. After flying towards a rather large building in a hover car Shepherd was thrust into battle along two quite linear, but open, corridors. The scene was taking place at night and it only helped to showcase the game's considerable polish. The visuals look considerably better than Mass Effect.
It's safe to say the majority of the gameplay is extremely similar. However, there seems to have been vast changes made to the weapon-based powers. There was a lot more variety, although the new powers seem to encompass what was previously implemented as ammo types. It's unclear whether these are also remaining, just separated. Grenades were also unavailable in the demo. The health system has also been changed as medi-gel was no longer required to heal wounds, health recovers over time instead.
With regards to weaponry, there only seemed to be one notable addition, which came in the heavy weapons department. The new weapon, a rocket launch, seemed rather imbalanced at first as not only did the projectiles home in on enemies, they also caused extreme damage. Despite these advantages, it does seem some care has gone into this as an ammo limit was imposed on the gun; but for the purposes of the demo, it was more than enough to clear the entire section.
It was very difficult to tell how much the AI has improved, if at all. In some instances they used cover well, and advanced on the player, at other times they didn't really take advantage of the situation. Like before, simply storming up to the cover they are behind allows the player to fire directly into them at point blank, with the enemies making no effort to counter. It's hard to say from a short, and somewhat tame, section of the game how apparent this will be later on, but it did feel far too similar to the first game. Which brings up the topic of the cutscenes. The dialogue and camera angles felt identical. Something that was hoped to be a bit more elaborated on has a feeling of deja vu about it.
Arguably it's still early days with the game still being a work in progress and the actual release being sometime toward the later half of January, 2010. However, the game didn't really seem to do that much different from the original. No planetary action or quests were seen, but as far as the gameplay goes it felt almost identical. There was a lot more polish graphically, but it appears BioWare took a safe bet on keeping what worked and just furthering the story. Still this isn't a bad thing, as the first game was a success and the second will be undoubtably just as intriguing.
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