To begin with, I loved Mass Effect. It was the first game I completed since Metal Gear Solid in 1997. It’s enthralling, captivating, challenging and incredibly well written.

The story of the first game concerns Commander Shepard, a mononymous solider in The Alliance, a group of high tier species operating out of The Citadel. One of their top operatives, known as Spectres, has gone batshit rogue on them and it’s up to Shepard and his accumulated team of speaking parts to stop him.

Fast Forward 2 years and Shepard is commanding The Normandy SR1, until the truly breathtaking opening sequence happens and everything goes very suddenly to shit.

Mass Effect 2 continues the story of our hero, who is fully customisable by the way, as he fights to save the Universe once more, this time within the confines of the shadowy Cerberus organisation.

This is a Bioware game, so saying it’s well written is like saying your lamb burger tastes like lamb. And bread.

They’ve crafted Shepard into a truly remarkable character, shitting all over Master Chief for my money, and also... I dunno... Diddy Kong. The gameplay is similar to the first instalment in that you control Shepard from a 3rd person view point around various locations and planets, along with two members of your team, fighting aliens and what have you. As you interact with different characters [they’ve upped your team member count to 10 this time from the previous game’s 8] you’re given the choice to carry the conversation into various areas by asking questions and responding to things in different ways. Depending on your actions you’ll be awarded either Paragon or Renegade points, meaning if someone asks you how you are and you say “Fine thanks, how’s you’re Mum?” then it’s Paragon points for you, whereas if your comeback is “Shut your fucking mouth or I’ll slap you, and your WHORE mother, right in her whore mouth!” then Renegade is the way for you.

How you carry yourself in the game is crucial, because the majority of your time is taken up by finding and recruiting team members, then completing special missions to win their individual loyalty. You can pretty much do things in whatever the hell order you want, whipping from planet to planet and solar system to solar system, picking up folks for your army and saving the odd colony here and there for good measure.

It’s tough to talk about the actual plot of the game, for two reasons. Firstly because anything I say will give something away. This is a very intricately put together piece of interactive entertainment, and each beat enhances your enjoyment further, so I wouldn’t want to show the tits before you’ve even seen the dress. Secondly, my game is gonna be different to yours. Damn near everything you do will massively affect [ho ho] your experience. For example, you tell a character to fuck right off, but then later when you meet him, and he’s the key to getting what you want, he don’t want nothing to do with you.

The effects [mass effects...] of this are even more potent this time around, because Mass Effect 2 gives you the option to port across your character from the first game. You start with the same stats, same abilities, and above all the same repercussions from your ME1 saved game. THAT MEANS if you killed a character in game one, that dude won’t show up in game 2, at all. How you played through has direct consequences into how you can play through here, and there’s even a tip on a loading screen in ME2 warning you that decisions made could have huge impact for you in Mass Effect 3.

Like I said before, I hadn’t completed a game for over 10 years before ME1 came out, and I’ve only managed a handful since, but the second I finished ME2 I immediately started another game and played it all the way through again, just to see what happened if I did some stuff differently. The thing has 5 different endings for crying out loud! Downloadable characters too. I have to go again in a couple weeks because they’ve released a new Thief lady to add to the team, and I wanna see how she changes the narrative.

The Mass Effect series is as close as you’ll get to a playable movie trilogy [third one is in development as we speak] and the tangled web of options means you’ll be enjoying a whole different movie to your friends. Your Shepard might be a blonde haired white guy, or a cool black guy with a goatee, or a sexy redheaded woman [yes, you can make Shepard a woman too] and you might choose to be a nice guy or a bell-end or a bit of both. You might fuck the hot criminal, or the Australian mission specialist... or your PA, or all of them. It is completely and entirely up to you.

No other game going offers you this much freedom while still keeping your eyes on the mission at hand.

Play this game.

Really.