The continuation of an amazing award-winning series!
PROS:
This game has bajillion pros to it. The characters have personalities and interesting ones at that. The acting is superb with some famous actors like Seth Green, Martin Sheen and Carrie-Ann Moss. The story continues as the Alliance are still at war with the Reapers and now the Reapers have new allies called the Collectors who are building highly dangerous things for them and helping them win the war. So we take the fight to the Collecters this time instead of the geth. The dialogue is at it's best with a great script. The cinematics are entertaining to watch and the ending gives you a need to play the third one when it comes out. Mass Effect games feel like epic sci-fi movies and hopefully if they actually make a good mass effect movie, it can, i believe, beat the Star Wars franchise. They have the action, the drama, the romance, the epicness, and the dialogue. Gamers, (mostly casual gamers) that don't really care about story or anything like that that much, i do not reccomend this for you because it has a lot of story and dialogue which i wish more games had to make it more interesting not plain out action like some dumb boring action movies offer. The RPG elements are as RPG-y as the first one's. They took out a lot or at least i heard which i don't know what they're talking about. You can still upgrade your character and your team. You can also train to get new biotic powers and upgrade your weapons and armor and ship and all that. For all that, you will need minerals. And with that, you travel through the galaxy and scan different planets to get these minerals which i scanned all of them and had more than enough minerals. There are lots of missions (Optional and Main) to keep you entertained. They are all innovative and get you to do different things (far from repetitive). One mission has you solving puzzles while another mission has a fast-paced feel to it as you're running to your goal as the ground is breaking apart. There are interesting optional missions to include humor and silliness. I enjoyed mostly every mission that this game had to offer and i played most of them.
CONS:
The game lets you play and does not frustrate you. The only times i felt frustrated is the real problem with the game. The loading system sucks the biggest ass. Alright first of all, i recommend for you to save often (no i don't mean auto-saving) i mean actually save from the menu that pops up when you push start. I'll tell you why and it's because the game has no point to auto-save because once you die, then the loading system autosaves when it's loading which takes you back to the beginning of the mission. I mean what the hell is up with that??? Also, did i mention that this game has one of the frikkin longest load times ever. The loading literally takes 1-2 minutes to load which i find highly frustrated especially when i die and i'm waiting to load the checkpoint (which starts from the beginning of the mission) So when it did load from the beginning of the game, i just loaded the save that i saved myself. It's terrible. I would rather have the elevators from the first game. If they think they improved that, they are highly wrong. Sometimes, the cinematics are unable to skip. There's nothing i hate more than when a game has no way to skip the cutscene especially when you die after that and have to replay all over again. I died and had to watch a two-minute cutscene all over again. Seriously, terrible Bioware terrible. Of course the cons have no part in the game play or story luckily.
OVERVIEW:
I loved this game and will have to say that it's my favorite game of 2010 so far. I'll just have to wait and see if that will be true by the time the year ends. It does have some highly annoying cons to the game, but it has 10 times more pros which keeps the game from "sucking." Alan Wake was my favorite of the year and now it's replaced with Mass Effect 2. Play the game if you're a gamer like me. If you don't play it, i don't see any game so far you'll love more than this game except maybe Red Dead Redemption (I don't know, i haven't played that game yet but will). It's not worth a rent, it's worth your 60 bucks. Actually the price is pretty good for the game because i got this game for 40 bucks. You can see some stores that offer that price which is a more than reasonable price for this game.