Mass Effect Review - BioWare at the Top of Its Game

The game opens with Commander Shepard's ship, the SS Normandy, being attacked by a reaper. Shepard manages to help everyone else escape into pods, but ends up cast out into space with a leaking air supply. We discover that Cerberus comes into possession of the body and spends two years using experimental technology to revive Shepard. Predictably, the galactic counsel played Sovereign (the reaper of the first game) off as merely a Geth ship and denied existence of the Reapers to the public. Therefore, it seems, little has been done in the two years Shepard has been gone. Cerberus' enigmatic leader, called the "Illusive Man", decides that someone needs to take the fight to the Reapers, and is behind the decision to resurrect Shepard. Aside Shepard's impressive skill set, the Illusive Man believes Shepard is a symbol that can inspire the galaxy into the action necessary to defeat the Reapers. Shepard and Cerberus, though once enemies, join forces as a result mass effect andromeda romance. Shepard begins a new quest, armed with a Normandy Mark II. He must build a new elite squad and prepare both his ship and the galaxy for a fight like nothing anyone has had before. While doing this of course he must also uncover further mysteries of the Reapers if he's to formulate a strategy against them. GAMEPLAY The controls and general feel of the game are very similar to the original Mass Effect. Movement and firing are unchanged, and you can still take cover behind boxes and walls. The number of animations for cover and other combat movements has been drastically improved, and overall the combat plays a bit more solidly than the first game. The previous "overheat" system for weapons has been altered; now there are cooling rods that have a limited number of uses. This functions effectively as an ammo system, which is unlike the first game. Grenades are no more, but other nifty toys fill this void and then some. Rather than the previous set up of four weapon types (pistol, shotgun, assault rifle, sniper rifle), in Mass Effect 2 there are a larger number of weapon types, and you are limited to four in what you carry with you. Pistols, for example, now come in two classes: heavy and automatic. The skill point system works a little differently than before. Each character has a set list of abilities as before, but each ability is divided up into a fewer number of levels, each one requiring increasingly more points to increase the rank further. For example, one rank of a certain skill may require one point, but to achieve the second rank takes two points. The skill lists themselves are no longer focused on weapon proficiencies, but primarily in abilities. Presumably this is because with all the characters' considerable military backgrounds and the fact that Shepard was on level 30-60 last game-we can safely say each character is a master of their chosen weapons.