I was never a huge fan of the first title in the Mass Effect series. While it did many things well, it never grabbed me as it had so many other players. So going into Mass Effect 2, my expectations were pretty low.

I love the setting of Mass Effect. The progenitor race, the mass relays, the Citadel, the interspecies politics. And as much as I’ve never been a fan of the alien species in Star Trek and Star Wars, the races of Mass Effect were as well done as could be expected. Personally, I’d much prefer that aliens were more than overly short, tall, fat, skinny, or muscular humans with face prostheses.

Bioware also does a great job with its characters. While I found Miranda and Jacob to be fairly boring, many of the other characters were very well done. Mordin was my personal favorite, and as much as I didn’t love the first game, the return of Tali and Garrus was very nice. Tali grew on me. Jack annoyed me, which made her memorable. Grunt became that supremely useful guy who I never got close to. Thane and Samara made very nice late additions to my group. All the characters were well fleshed-out, probably aided by the fact that I did all the loyalty missions, even if I did succeed in pissing off Jack and Legion to the point where they weren’t loyal anymore.

I had heard so many good things about the female Shepherd voice actress that I played the femme-Shep. I enjoyed it. She feels much less generic than the male Shepherd I’d played in the first game. I tried to romance Miranda, but was never able to make anything happen. Maybe it’s because I’d had a romantic rendezvous with Garrus.

Somewhere around the 50%-65% mark in the game, I developed a theory. It turned out to be totally false, but I think my theory was almost more interesting than the game’s actual plot. If you haven’t yet played Mass Effect 2 and want to avoid spoilers, skip the rest of this paragraph. No spoilers after the ending of this paragraph – this is your last warning. Okay. So after I learned that the Collectors were harvesting human genetic material, I knew that they needed it but not why. My theory was that they wanted Shepherd’s DNA. I thought that perhaps Shepherd was resurrected for the sole purpose of serving the Reapers’ ends, although the details were fuzzy. Following that line of thought, I’d theorized that The Illusive Man was actually an illusion, and controlled by the Reapers to boot. And while my theory was totally wrong and totally bogus, I’m willing to bet that we learn in Mass Effect 3 that he’s actually an AI. Insanely ironic that the leader of a radical pro-human organization isn’t actually human.

As mediocre as I found the majority of Mass Effect 2, the finale made it all worthwhile. The game’s end segment was fantastic. I’ve long been a fan of killing off the main characters in a story as a way of maintaining dramatic tension, and Mass Effect uses this to great effect in the game’s end sequence. Another part of what made it great and unpredictable is the fact that while I knew that it was possible for all characters to live or die depending on your actions, it wasn’t clear what actions determined the fates of the game’s characters. Loyalty? How much damage they’d taken in a mission? Something else? I’m still really not sure. The following game events are not really spoilers since they pertain to my playthrough specifically and likely will not happen in your playthrough. Legion died after successfully navigating an air vent, and he wasn’t loyal to me after I’d taken Tali’s side in an argument. But I also lost Grunt, who was totally loyal. And in regards to my other non-loyal character, it had appeared that Jack survived after escorting us through a segment using her biotic bubble, but it later showed me a quick pan of her dead body while Collectors ran past. Not sure what happened there. But I was nearly tempted to give that last segment another playthrough. Not gonna happen at this point though. I’ve uninstalled Mass Effect 2 and I’m playing the next game.