RETRO PLAY-THROUGH | 'Mass Effect 2' Finale
Here we go! Let's take one final look at 'Mass Effect 2', coursing the story arc, the side quests, the characters and the overall gameplay.
Many gameplay elements were improved out of sight for 'Mass Effect 2'. The combat, while much easier, is much more fun; the weapons system is streamlined so that it makes sense; the side quests and questing areas are better designed, even if a little samey. But let’s have a look at the best and worst parts of the game before we finally take down the Collectors. Especially since, you’ll need to cover a lot of this if you want your crew to survive.
One of the biggest elements introduced in this game are the 'loyalty missions'. Beginning in the second half of the game, each of your crew members will come to you with a problem that they need your help to solve; these vary widely in plotting and theme, with some even mixing up the gameplay and staying away from combat. They also give the character an extra power, costume and give Shepard the ability to learn one of your teammates’ powers.
Which mission each player will find most interesting will come down to which of the crew members they like the most. Personally, the best are Kasumi's, Tali's and Grunt's, with honourable mentions to Mordin's and Samara's.
Kasumi’s mission is a break-in to a very opulent mansion during a party before shooting your way out of a vault; this mission is a good balance of combat and dialogue, with a hint of puzzle solving thrown in for good measure. Plus, Kasumi is a fun character so it’s good to give her some focus.
Tali’s mission involves travelling to the quarian Migrant Fleet for her trial for treason. Apparently, her father had been using the geth pieces she’d sent back to build actual active geth - a traitorous act. The mission also gives a good balance of combat and dialogue, and provides a good amount of backstory and character moments, as well as some set up for 'Mass Effect 3'. Plus, it’s one of the missions where completing it could lead to you losing Tali’s loyalty anyway.
Grunt’s mission involves travelling to the krogan homeworld because, seriously, he’s in krogan puberty; this means that he needs to go through the process of becoming a member of a clan through a trial. If Wrex survived the first game, he’d be the leader of his clan and would give Grunt membership in it.
There are two very simple reasons why this mission works so well: the first is that you must fight a thresher maw on foot in one of the games most entertaining fights, and the other is that you get to head-butt a krogan for insulting you. Both inspired design choices.
Mordin’s mission, like Tali’s, provides nice character moments and backstory while also setting up the next game. One choice in this mission proves very consequential in the next installment.
Samara’s mission is nice because it doesn’t actually involve any combat. It plays out like a detective story as Shepard and Samara question witnesses and collect clues for hunting down Samara’s serial killer daughter. There’s a weird choice available if you feel like switching out Samara for her sociopathic daughter, but I feel like that’s a rarely taken option for completionists and pure Renegade play throughs.
For the most part, the other loyalty missions are fine. There are some nice character moments in each of them but they don’t really change much or provide that unique an experience.
The only one you could call 'bad' is the one belonging to nobody’s favourite squad member: Jacob Taylor. It seems his father crashed in the USS Sci-Fi Reference a few years earlier and has finally turned on the distress beacon. It turns out that the native vegetation on the planet causes neurological decay. He’s been hogging all the stored rations and then using the female crew of his ship as sex slaves. It’s not a terrible idea for a small mission but there’s no reason for it to be Jacob’s father and it’s not like it seems to matter all that much to him in the grand scheme of things; this is just further reinforcement that Jacob seems to be the character most making up the numbers on the Normandy.
Other side quests can be gained either by receiving messages from some Cerberus person or by finding them during your regular scanning of planets. They usually consist of a couple of rooms filled with enemies you’ve fought on other missions - nothing that special, which is a shame because they are the best things to come out of scanning planets.
In the first game players had to gather resources on the ground. The good news is that in this game you get to scan them from orbit. The bad news is that they are far more important. Most upgrades, new weapons and, most crucially, improvements to the Normandy are paid with the resources you collect.
If you don’t upgrade the Normandy several crewmembers will die in the Collector base. On higher difficulties, if you don’t buy the upgrades for your weapons and armour, you will have a much harder time getting through the game. But with a fully upgraded ship and a squad focussed on the mission, it’s time to take down the Collectors for good.
As you approach the Omega 4 Relay, anyone you’ve romanced will come up for some comfort. If you romanced someone in the first game, you’ll look wistfully at their photo. Otherwise it’s time for battle!
On the other side of the relay jump is a wasteland of old destroyed ships: others who came before you. In the wasteland are several small craft that ambush and attack the Normandy; one even manages to get into the shuttle bay requiring Shepard and a team to fight it. It’s not a difficult fight but the craft has some firepower that can quickly kill you. After it’s destroyed Joker flies us toward the actual base.
As the Normandy approaches the Collector base the Collector cruiser from earlier launches and starts attacking. The upgrades will keep your crew alive and take down the ship, but not before it causes the Normandy to crash onto the surface of the base. Now you need to plan your attack with your team.
The next two sections are based around protecting a specialised member of your team as they help guide the rest of you through the area. There are plenty of Collectors to fight and the scale of the moment is quite evident in each of the arenas.
The first section has you help a tech expert through a heating vent so that they can open some doors for the rest of you. Tali is the best choice as she is clearly the best engineer. Players will also need to assign a squad leader for the rest of your team (not the two you take with you). Garrus is the best since everyone seems to respect him. After making it through, hopefully with no casualties, you'll come across a terrifying site.
There are hundreds of pods, each of them filled with a person. You come across a woman who wakes up before being liquefied before your eyes; this may well signal to you that you took too long after your crew was abducted as it might be Kelly Chambers you see die. Hopefully you moved quickly enough so that you can save your crew. However, now you need to help them get back to the Normandy and that means sending someone with them. The best choice here is Mordin as he is vulnerable later on and can protect the crew well enough to get them back.
Now comes the second room. Here you’ll need a biotic specialist to keep seeker swarms off you while you head through a room filled with them. You need a pure biotic to do this so Samara seems like a solid choice.
Garrus will again lead the second team. In this room, Shepard’s team has a small bubble of safety around the biotic specialist while fighting off Collectors and husks - it gives you a sense of claustrophobia and stresses you when enemies close in. When you reach the door, the biotic will fling the swarms away with their mighty power. It’s a great looking shot, probably one of the best in the game.
Now it’s the final section of the game. You need to choose your squad carefully as the others will need to hold the line, just like Kirrahe, while you head to the central chamber to set off a big bomb. Squad members that are more purely one side of biotic or tech will be more likely to die. So two of Tali, Jack, Mordin, Miranda and Kasumi need to be in your team most likely. Which is going to make the next section really hard.
This final section is very similar to the first fights on the Collector cruiser. You’re on a floating platform and other platforms fly in and drop enemies on you. There’s nothing new here, just a lot more of it. With a fully upgraded squad and the experience of playing the last 20-30 hours, you should find nothing too taxing. After this, you discover what the Collectors have been harvesting humans for: they’re making a human reaper! This twist kind of comes out of nowhere as the other Reapers all look the same and there’s not much of a hint as to their reproduction until now. It’s a strange element to bring up at the end of the second game. It seems suggestive that they were trying to corrupt humans the same way they did with the Collectors. But in any case, there’s a giant robotic/organic abomination to destroy, so let’s do it.
First, Shepard needs to shoot down the piping hold it up. They’re armoured most of the time so there are enemies that need to be killed while keeping one eye open for when the pipes are vulnerable. It can be annoying when you need to go through a whole mess of extra enemies just because a pipe has a sliver of health that you didn’t take down in time but that’s how Bioware decided to design it.
After the pipes are down, the Reaper falls into the abyss below and Shepard starts setting up the bomb. The Illusive Man takes this opportunity to contact you and suggest you use a neutron pulse to kill all the Collectors while leaving the base intact. If all the side quests demonstrating how bad Cerberus is at handling advanced technology didn’t convince you that this would be a bad idea, then sure - go with his suggestion. Otherwise, you’ll order the transmission cut and if Miranda or Jacob are with you, they’ll resign from Cerberus on the spot.
Just as Shepard is about to activate the bomb and get out of there, the human reaper climbs back up. Now this is a final boss! Although the entire game hinted at the Collector General being a boss, this will have to do.
The Reaper has a giant laser beam and can lean over cover so positioning is really important. There are also more Collectors attacking you, so the fight is a massive shootout. If you’ve unlocked one particular heavy weapon, the fight can be over in just one shot. Otherwise, a slow, patient approach is necessary.
Once the human reaper is down for good, the platform the team is on is knocked down. Then there’s a cutscene of all your squad running from some very inaccurate Collectors as Harbinger soliloquies about how great he is before leaving the Collectors to their fate.
Shepard is the last one to reach the Normandy (why is Joker the one at the door?), and takes a running jump which looks like they’re going to miss, but at the last second your squad members are there to save you. Unless you are bad at Shepard, in which case you actually die here.
The Normandy makes it back through the Relay as the base is destroyed. Shepard contacts the Illusive Man one last time and they discuss Shepard’s decision and the coming war. Shepard surveys their surviving squad members and reviews some information on the Reapers as the Reaper armada awakes and makes their way toward the galaxy…
And that’s the huge finale to the main 'Mass Effect 2' story! But we’re not quite done with this retrospective yet.
The DLC for this game was some of the strongest ever released, so we’ll cover all of those next time before finishing the series with a look at 'Mass Effect 3'.
Stay tuned!
With this retrospective comes the update that 'Mass Effect: Andromeda' is now available to purchase from all good gaming retailers! Grab your copy today. David Nolan
