It is a fine line when attempting to give a gamer the ability to make choices or decisions, and actually having those decisions or choices end with a satisfying payoff.  Some games will give you a superficial choice, with no ramifications, or at worst, a game will give you a decision to make that makes no difference in the actual outcome of events in the game.  In Mass Effect 2, every decision you make will have wide ranging outcomes not just for you, but for your entire squad, and it makes those choices meaningful with each avenue of discussion.  At the end of Mass Effect 2, you will see how far choice can take you in a video game, and it will have you sit back and feel how consequential your actions can be on the universe as a whole.  It is an amazing feat that Bioware has pulled this tactic off with Mass Effect 2, creating one of the best games to come out on a gaming platform ever.

In Mass Effect 2, you continue the galaxy exploits of Alliance soldier and now Spectre, Commander Shepard, now a few weeks after the attack on the Citadel.  You have been sent on a mission to find out why whole human colonies have been disappearing since this attack, which has sent you into a rough patch of space called the Terminus region.  While attempting to stay spoiler free with this review, just know that a huge event five minutes into the game changes the outcome of Shepard and the Normandy crew, as you are attacked by a strange ship that no one has ever seen before.  It is not a Reaper, but some other ship of unknown origin.  The attack leaves the Normandy in ruins and Shepard toiling in the far reaches of space.  Two years pass and Shepard is brought back to continue the search for the ship that attacked the first Normandy, and in the process, is forced to make alliances with a seedy human interest group known as Cerberus, and its leader, know only as The Illusive Man.

If you have played through the first Mass Effect, you will have at your disposal, a new feature that I have not see in a game before, and that is the ability to import a save from that game into Mass Effect 2.  Character transfers have happen in games past, but not on the level that Bioware has done with Mass Effect 2.  Every decision you have made in Mass Effect comes into play in Mass Effect 2, from the most significant event at the end of the game, down to the small bit players that you might have run into at any point in Mass Effect.  Some of you might remember the Citadel resident fan boy, Conrad Verner.  He shows up in Mass Effect 2 with an attitude that will depend on how you treated him in the first game.  Or the ruthless crime lord, Helena Blake.  Depending on the outcome of your meetings, she could be in the second game.  It is amazing to see how these prior decisions play out depending on your prior play through of Mass Effect, and after playing through the sequel twice, it is amazing to see the ramifications of those choices with two distinctly different choices.  After seeing this feature in action, I have to say that that more developers should look to the framework that Bioware has set in place with the Mass Effect series, because it is done so well.

Choice and decision continue to be a central theme in Mass Effect 2, but at a more significant level.  In the first game, you would make choices, but they never felt super difficult, or commanding in nature.  This time around, every decision you make in Mass Effect 2 has the potential to end with jubilation or sadness.  There are points where your decisions could mean survival or death of your squad mates, and those decisions end up putting a face on the reality of what a squad leader has to face every time they face combat.  There is no greater feeling in gaming when you make a tough decision that ends up being the difference between survival of a crew member, or death.  There was a moment in my second play through where I chose a person to lead a squad, and because of their poor decision making skills, they ended up costing me the life of a dedicated teammate.  To know that a team member died because of my poor decision making skills on the battlefield had impact and meaning, to the point where I felt the urge to reload.  Instead, I sucked it up, knowing full well that this meant that squad member would never see the events of Mass Effect 3.  And yes, loading screens allude to the fact that all of your decisions now, as well as the ones from Mass Effect 1 will carry over to the final game in the trilogy.

If you are a veteran of Mass Effect 1, you will find several new and some changed mechanics from the first game, that will have you cheering or cheated, depending on your ability to accept these design choices.  Gone is the elaborate skill tree for each character, instead having a shorter list of point based skills, broken down to the simplest of components.  With a soldier, I had a couple skills for ammo, a concussive blast and one or two other skills and that was it.  If you were a fan of tinkering your many different skills across all squad members, you might be a bit disappointed with the sparseness of the skill tree.  The same thing goes for combat now.  No longer are your skills reflective of the points spent on said skills.  Instead, your aim with a rifle or pistol will control your success on the battlefield.  Yes, combat is all based on your shooting skills, and this is probably the biggest change of all.  If you are not at shooters, you might have problems with beating Mass Effect 2.  However, this new shooting mechanic does bring about localized damage, so headshots now have meaning, as they can sometimes drop an opponent with one round, if unshielded.

Visually, Mass Effect 2 vastly improves on the framework of the first game.  With the first Mass Effect, it was not uncommon to see pop-in textures, slow loads and graphical anomalies.  All of those issues are completely gone, as Bioware has had a lot more times to learn the ins and outs of the Xbox 360.  Yes load times can be a chore at times, but at least they are no longer masked by the longest elevator rides in the history of science fiction.  Now we get conventional load screens, and it seems like larger sections of the game are loaded into memory.  All of the characters seem to be sharper in detail, down to the small scars on someone’s face, or the blast scars on your armor.  Now harnessing the full power of the Xbox 360 with efficiency, Mass Effect 2 is truly a sight to behold on a nice big screen.  However, if you are using an SD television, be aware that text does tend to look rather small and illegible at times.  I was never affected by this, but when I looked at the game on an SD set, it was very noticeable.

One of the bigger complaints in the previous game was the explorations segments of the Mass Effect. Go to an unexplored world, scan for minerals or loot, move to the next planet, rinse and repeat.  Same things goes for on-world mini-missions where you go to a planet, harvest a few mineral sites, check out some relics, while finding a mercenary camp, or Rachni hideout.  These segments would be good when you got to the actual objective, but actually rolling around the planet in the Mako could be rather dull and boring, not to mention hard to control at times.  I was one of the few people that enjoyed the Mako, although I turned driving it into a mini-game of its own, seeing how much big air I could get in the vehicle off of a cliff.  Yeah, maybe not exciting to most, but I enjoyed it.  Instead, when you find a mission on an undiscovered world, you get an anomaly while scanning (more on this in a minute), where you can send a probe down to find the mission and then you go planetside, directly to your objective.  These missions are more tightly focus, and yes fans; they all have a distinct look, so you never feel like you are in the same building ad-nauseum.

Mass Effect 2 has changed the mini-games that you had to play in order to unlock a wall safe, or datapad.  Gone are the days of playing a Simon like color matching game, and in its place is a text matching or icon matching game.  Yes, they are still a bit simple, but they seem to fit a lot better into the science fiction aspect of Mass Effect 2 universe.  Also, added is a new planet scanning mini-game, which makes finding minerals on a planet a bit more interactive, as well as important.  When you scan a planet, and target reticule shows up on the planet and you run the scanner over the planet.  When the controller starts to vibrate, a graph on the right of the screen will show you what mineral composition is, and the option to fire a probe to pick up the deposit.  These minerals are important, as they are used to upgrade your ship, weapons and armor.  Without going through this chore, you will not be able to research some of the items that might help you survive the more difficult parts of Mass Effect 2.  Yes the planet scanning is a chore, not because of its repetitiveness, but more due to the planet scanning process being so slow.  You can easily spend 10 minutes scanning a planet clean of mineral deposits.  Figure in that there are probably over 200 planets that can be scanned, and you start to loathe the process.  Hopefully, planet scanning can be refined, or sped up a bit in Mass Effect 3, but as of now, it is a necessary evil that you will have to trudge through.

Jack Wall has returned to score Mass Effect 2, and again the music in the game is phenomenal.  From the subtle score that you hear when a teammate goes down in combat, to the rousing music that comes from escaping near disaster, you are always enveloped by the sound.  Just listening to the background music when entering a scene helps you determine where the action is going to head.  Combat sounds are also all around you when in battle, from the chatter of your squad mates, down to the blast of a rifle.  It all comes together to form one stellar concerto of sound.  Voice work is also in place for all of the characters including some big Hollywood starts.  Martin Sheen steps in to provide the voice work of The Illusive Man, and it is so good.  His performance should be required listening for any actor or actress in Hollywood that decides to do voice acting in a game.  Every line is delivered with force and meaning, which can be lacking from some big name actors.  Also I would be remiss if I did not mention the talented Jennifer Hale, as the female voice of Commander Shepard, or Mark Meer as the male voice of Shepard.  Both deliver their lines with emotion and conviction, which helps you get into the character that you are playing.

Mass Effect 2 has set the bar high for all other gaming epics that might follow in its footsteps.  With it, Bioware has shown the way that decision making and arcing storylines should be done in the future.  Each decision and choice has impact and meaning on the universe, including your own survival.  With so much going on in a huge title like Mass Effect 2, it would be easy for a developer to phone it in, but the game delivers on so many levels.  Sure there are a few things that could use some tightening up here and there, but overall, Mass Effect 2 is one of the best games of 2010, if not in the past decade of gaming.  You would be remiss if you decided to pass on this title.  Mass Effect 2 receives 5 out of 5 Aeropausonauts.