For space, fabric suits seem fine, but planetary exploration is a dirty, rough business. I don't understand why they aren't thinking more along the lines of a newt suit. Yes, much heavier, but it would last exponentially longer and be exponentially safer.

For this reason I kinda hope we actually burn through our earthly helium supply ASAP. Then we'd finally have an incentive for urgent planetary exploration that the government understands.

I think people understate just how much of a mess the gameplay of of ME1 was. The shooting felt subpar by 3rd person shooter standards. The abilities were either poorly thought out or overpowered. Remember all the floating helplessly and praying not to die? The inventory interface was an atrocity. The game suffered from a Diabloesque overload of randomly generated loot. Fucking omnigel. Endless bouncy rover missions on spiky randomly generated terrain, all so you can slowly horde minerals and literally useless collectibles.

I totally agree that some of that could have been fixed and redeemed rather than scrapped and replaced. I'd like to see weapon mods, armor mods, and implants come back. As well as a fun version of vehicle based planetary exploration.

But over all, ME2 managed to make the combat solid and enjoyable. While keeping the focus on the story and characters, which is really what kept most of us playing.

>> ^xxovercastxx:
I still enjoyed ME2, I just found it rather light. I wanted ME2 to be Mass Effect Extreme, not Diet Mass Effect.
I was surprised to find out people had such problems driving the MAKO. I had a blast with that thing. I loved that you could land on any planet and drive around, I just wish more of those planets had something on them to discover. To me, they "fixed" planetary exploration completely backwards: they removed the fun part (exploring) and featured the boring part (there's nothing on any of the planets). If you didn't like the handling of the MAKO, that's a separate issue, IMO. I would have been fine with a completely new vehicle so long as the exploration was still an option.


I've heard that the MAKO was really tough to control on the consoles, where the MAKO followed the turret, while on the PC you can move the MAKO and turret independently. I do agree the MAKO was fun, though the things you encountered were a bit bland and generic. This mineral scanning thing is terrible, why not have the onboard AI EDI do in a microsecond what takes you minutes. Instead of ditching the MAKO thye should have just improved the variety of planetary exploration.
I also hate that they removed the weapon statistics and that there are only something like 20 different weapons. Also you can't customize your squad's armor anymore. I wish they wouldn't have simplified this game so much to please the console generation.
Still I'm having fun with it, but I doubt I'll buy the third one.

Last thing I really can't stand how game review sites always praise overhyped games to death. Just look at the metacritic site. A third of the ratings are a perfect 10 and another third 9+. Same thing with Dragon Age
Are there any honest review sites?

I still enjoyed ME2, I just found it rather light. I wanted ME2 to be Mass Effect Extreme, not Diet Mass Effect.

I was surprised to find out people had such problems driving the MAKO. I had a blast with that thing. I loved that you could land on any planet and drive around, I just wish more of those planets had something on them to discover. To me, they "fixed" planetary exploration completely backwards: they removed the fun part (exploring) and featured the boring part (there's nothing on any of the planets). If you didn't like the handling of the MAKO, that's a separate issue, IMO. I would have been fine with a completely new vehicle so long as the exploration was still an option.

Most of the feature simplifications don't bother me on their own, but all together and combined with how short the game is, I just feel like so much is missing.