First for a quick recap, if you don’t remember, Mass Effect one ends with Commander Shepherd saving the Citadel from the Reaper Sovereign. To accomplish this you had the choice to let the Citadel council’s escaping ship be destroyed by Sovereign and let humanity take its proper place as ruler of galaxy; or you could save the council in the hopes that they would finally give humanity a break and let them join the council.  This is just one of several important choices that you made in the original Mass Effect. While you could tell that they were meaningful choices they did not really have an effect in Mass Effect.

That has changed for Mass Effect 2, your decisions decided the entire fate of Citadel space and everyone knows it. Mass Effect 2 allows you to import your character and choices from the original and continue as your Shepherd, minus your skills. If you don’t have a Mass Effect save then the game just chooses for you, which sucks.  You don’t get to decide what choices you would have made in Mass Effect. Which I think is a terrible design decision. The story you have if you don’t import your save is the exact opposite of the choices I made in the original game. I no longer have my save from Mass Effect so I couldn’t import it, but I still want to decide what choices I made, not have the game decide for me. But besides being the opposite of everything I stood for in the original game the story in Mass Effect 2 is great.

Mass Effect 2 starts with an amazing intro scene where the Normandy is destroyed and Shepherd is flung, half-dead, into space. Shepherd's body is picked up by a  radical human extremist group named Cerbus. They spend two years bringing Shepherd back from the brink of death so that he can stop the Collectors who are destroying human colonies. The Collectors are the new puppets of the Reapers like Sarin and the Geth were before them. The human alliance has ignored the Reaper threat so the Illusive Man, leader of Cerbus, has brought Shepherd back to stop them himself. The Illusive Man sends Shepherd to put together a new team to bring down the Collectors and keep the Reapers in deep space where they belong.

Your new team is spread across the galaxy and the first 10 hours of Mass Effect 2 is spent collecting them. Originally I thought it would be a boring pain in the ass to travel from planet to planet collecting each of the new ten members of your team, but surprisingly this has been a ton of fun! Each time you go to collect a member you have to do a quest of some sort, because they always have some sort of problem or reason holding them up. Of course it's up to you to help them out; but what surprised me was how much fun helping them out is. Stopping a plague, breaking them out of prison, and others are all super fun. I have just managed to collect everyone now that I am at the ten hour mark. I don’t think I have ever had so much fun collecting an entire party.

The combat has been much improved in this sequel. The original combat for Mass Effect was clunky and awkward and the game just didn’t feel like a shooter. In Mass Effect 2 the combat feels like you are actually playing a third person shooter, not an RPG with crappy combat. The combat borrows heavily from games like Gears of War and Rainbow Six; you are always heading for cover and pressing up against boxes and pillars. If you stand out in the open then you will be dead in a matter of seconds.  Along with a revamp of the overall combat you also get a new arsenal of cool weapons to kill with; grenade launchers, flame throwers, and fiery lasers are just some of the new toys you get to play with. Overall the combat is ten times better than it was in the original Mass Effect.

I do have a complaint with Mass Effect 2 though. I am a huge western RPG game fan -- it's practically all I play. The original Mass Effect felt like an RPG with third person combat, but Mass Effect 2 feels like a third person shooter with an RPG style conversation tree and some light RPG elements. This is not necessary a bad thing, it is just a slight departure from what the original was like. Also the lack of an inventory that you can access at anytime is yet another departure from the heavier RPG style of the first game. But these are all small complaints from a guy who lives and breathes RPGs.

Mass Effect 2 seems like a better, prettier, and more streamlines version of Mass Effect. Every major problem of Mass Effect has been addressed. From what I can tell from the first ten hours Mass Effect 2 is everything a sequel should be. Check back later this week for a full review by Jake Handy, and check out NoMoreGameCasts Episode 28 for an even more in-depth look at the first few hours of Mass Effect 2.