Pretty much every dialogue, every location, every character, every cutscene, every scene is made to look and feel good. The game is now purely about cinematic action RPG/third person shooting and damn if it wasn’t really well done. Social skills are directly tied to Paragon/Renegade scores, hacking no longer tied to a skill but available as a basic thing any character can do, weapon proficiency being not a skill but a limit to weapons the characters can carry, while the actual action bits being determined mostly by player skill rather than numbers and dice rolls. The huge and confusing mess of skills and background RPG elements and mechanics is distilled to mostly action-focused stuff that is easy to understand. Missions that are incredibly linear even if they involve a vehicle to the point of locking you from going back to previous parts of the location at each checkpoint in most of them and making a lot of items you can find (for quests or for your equipment) one-off missables. The exploration aspect is almost entirely gone – there are no planets to explore, only missions to do. Where Mass Effect 1 was a nerdy game for space and sci-fi nerds giving you a huge galaxy to explore and get lost in, Mass Effect 2 is an action packed adventure of a space cop and his awesome crew. Going straight from the first game into the second one feels weird – the sequel feels so different, yet, somehow, so right.
It simplifies most of the things and focuses only on what it can do well, and then does it exceptionally well.
Instead of going so big and grand, it tries to go simple and detailed. Mass Effect 2 is ambitious in a very different way. All on the scale never done before and rarely tried after. Mass Effect was incredibly ambitious – huge emphasis on exploring space, an epic yet personal choice and character driven story, third person combat that tries to also be a complex action RPG.
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