Mass Effect 2 Collector's Edition (Xbox 360)

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Release Date: 29/01/2010

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Summary

Developer:: BioWare Corp
Publisher:: EA Games

The Mass Effect 2 Collector's Edition includes:

Mass Effect 2 the game
Dark Horse Comic Issue #1 Edition
Hardcover Art Book
Bonus DVD (content TBC but will contain making of videos, soundtrack etc)
Exclusive In-Game Armour (pictured here)
Cerberus Network Membership Card - Once enrolled you will have access to exclusive in-game content and updates via an in-game feed

Mass Effect 2 - The Game

Two years after Commander Shepard repelled invading Reapers bent on the destruction of organic life, a mysterious new enemy has emerged. On the fringes of known space, something is silently abducting entire human colonies. Now Shepard must work with Cerberus, a ruthless organization devoted to human survival at any cost, to stop the most terrifying threat mankind has ever faced.

To even attempt this perilous mission, Shepard must assemble the galaxy?s most elite team and command the most powerful ship ever built. Even then, they say it would be suicide. Commander Shepard intends to prove them wrong.

Mankind?s Future is At Stake

From the makers of Star Wars®: Knights of the Old Republic?, Dragon Age: Origins?, and Mass Effect? comes the dark second instalment in the thrilling Mass Effect Trilogy!
Command a unique team of amazing characters on a perilous mission in the most dangerous regions of space.
Players of the first Mass Effect can import save games to continue the story of their own Commander Shepard. New players will find a thrilling stand-alone adventure awaits them, a polished and action packed journey that surpasses the first game in nearly every possible way.

Intense Third Person Combat

Take cover, command an elite squad with ease, utilize 19 weapon classes including heavy weapons, and unleash deadly powers against your foes with an all new and improved combat system.
Increased intensity with precision shooter controls to let you control the action and overcome insurmountable odds.
Featuring a new location based damage system: target key weak points, and blast off limbs, ignite enemies, or cripple and disable enemy troops.

An Entire Galaxy to Explore

Travel the distant and deadly reaches of space to assemble your team for the mission at hand. A cast of amazing characters await discovery on a variety of dangerous, visually stunning worlds.
Survey unique planets and embark on side missions to uncover more secrets in the Mass Effect universe.

Robust Character Customisation

Choose a player class, customize your appearance, and tailor your own abilities and strengths. As you progress, so do Shepard?s abilities.
Control the conversation. Improved conversation system where you can take matters into your own hands ? often with the liberal application of force.

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Gamestation Reviews
Customer Reviews Customer Reviews

Mass Effect 2 Review; Author: Mark Scott

Mass Effect 2 Review ; Author: Mark Scott

Massively affecting

The first Mass Effect was a very good sci-fi action RPG that began to border on greatness as it reached its climax, but was let down by a rather plodding start, some niggling inventory issues, wonky vehicle sections and a duck-and-cover combat engine which couldn't quite escape its stat-churning roots.

I for one quite enjoyed it, but only after bumping the difficulty right down; ignoring the unintuitive squad commands in favour of walking right up to enemies and making my highly-powered Vanguard character shotgun them in the face.

Mass Effect 2 is a very different beast. Doing away with pretty much all of the negatives and telling a much darker middle chapter to the trilogy, this is the highly-tuned, lavishly polished shooter RPG hybrid that the first game promised to be, and a title even non-RPG fans should look at recruiting for their collection.

"A highly-tuned, lavishly polished shooter RPG hybrid"

Begin again

Not that RPG fans should feel left out. If like me you lost yourself in Dragon Age: Origins, you'll be right back at home here. Mass Effect 2 is every bit the classic BioWare game, complete with dialogue trees (now with options for mid-convo interrupts), moral choices (now with much more compelling consequences), complex party characters with deep back stories (now with a Dragon Age loyalty system), and a wealth of different ways to play depending on the class of character you punt for in the game's opening act.

If you ARE an original Mass Effect player though, you'll be most looking forward to continuing the story using your original iteration of Commander Shepard; carrying over your moral choices, as well as any credits you had left at its finale. Handily, you can redefine your ME1 character's class at the outset here; encouraging you to explore a different way of playing the game (thank God - my shotgun-only routine was getting old), and enabling you to take advantage of the far superior shooter setup.

Channelling Gears of War via Ghost Recon, Mass Effect 2 can lay claim to the most satisfying real-time combat engine yet seen in an RPG. The big improvements from its forebear are the new snap-to-cover button, and the simplification of squad commands which see you direct partner one with the left d-pad button, and partner two with the d-pad right. Coupled with the returning power wheel, which pauses combat to let you set attacks, improved damage-mapping across different body parts, and Halo-style regenerating health, and you've a system which is intuitive, sophisticated, and highly adaptable.

"intuitive, sophisticated, and highly adaptable."

Trimmed and binned

That's backed up by a vastly streamlined inventory system, which sees you upgrading your basic weapons and armour in your ship's lab and simply assigning them to your three-man (or woman, or androgynous alien) team at the start of each story mission. Medi gel also makes a return (now used to revive fallen squadmates) and different types of ammo will come in handy, but both are accessed from the power wheel during combat.

But that's it, as far as items go. No searching out rare armours, concocting salves or working out what to buy, sell and dump. It's a brave move that makes Mass Effect much more approachable for RPG newcomers, but might leave diehards who enjoyed the inventory-balancing metagame a little bit miffed.

The big effect on the story is that you spend more time playing missions, and less time hopping around menus. This can only be a good thing. There are pages of Codexes to read (or listen to), but unlike Dragon Age they only support the story with race background, rather than cataloguing your actions and telling the plot directly.

BioWare knows that many players will care more about shooting aliens, recruiting characters and being an interstellar hero or badass than reading up on The First Contact War or the Krogan Genophage, and it's for that reason they've spent the most time making worlds which are utterly believable, characters who enrich the experience, and missions that will live long in the memory.

Like the inventory system, the storytelling has had all of the flab trimmed and binned. The intro is fast, explosive and dramatic; the main structure is outlined within an hour, and you're soon out amongst the stars in the bigger and better mark-2 Normandy, recruiting party characters and tangenting off into sidequests with far more gravitas than the first game's flimsy extra-curricular activities.

"Every choice will form the basis for Mass Effect 3"

The RPG, evolved

Gone is the Mako's woeful driving, too. And the numerous barren planets you explored on it. In come on-foot exploration and planet scanning to replace them. The former means lots of enjoyable hacking minigames. The latter is a minigame in itself. Either way the upshot will be more resources and credits for upgrading your ammo, equipment, and the Normandy itself. It's all just another example of the way BioWare has distilled the RPG to its basic essence, while preserving a deep level of customisation and achievement at its core.

All of which we reckon will take you over 30 hours to polish off, taking time to immerse yourself fully in BioWare's bleak, fragmented galaxy; enjoying the shooter-infused RPG story alongside a healthy wedge of sidequests; seeking out the resources to enhance your squad and ship; picking your words carefully to get Paragon or Renegade points; and scouring the Codex to get a good feel for the political machinations underpinning it all.

And you won't mind devoting that much time in the slightest, since it looks jaw-dropping, sounds every bit as good as you'd expect from a triple-A orchestral-scored EA game, and boasts the added benefit that your every choice will form the basis for the final chapter in Mass Effect 3.

Where its forebear bordered on greatness, Mass Effect 2 reaches that benchmark early and then goes a galaxy beyond.

Paragon
+ A supreme shooter-RPG hybrid for fans of both genres.
+ Effortlessly streamlines the RPG genre without removing its core components of customisation, choice and consequence.
+ An epic 30+ hour galaxy-hopping story with real replay value.

Renegade
- RPG purists may miss the inventory management.
- If you really, really hate cutscenes and dialogue trees, this might not be for you.
- Download the DLC and you'll need to be connected to Xbox Live to load the singleplayer mode.

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