User blog comment:Snicker/Mass Effect 2/@comment-170990-20110614014340

And it's over. 80+ hours invested in Mass Effect 2 (I tend to play slow, but thoroughly). The last chapter was excellent, good pacing between the combat and plot sections. The finale was just what we've come to expect from the series. In fact, if it weren't for all the problems, I'd instantly nominate this as my favourite game, but there were just too many issues that were added in this game that didn't exist in the previous one.

That being said, here's my top things I liked:
 * Joker and Kasumi. Most of the characters were excellent, but those two stood out, both for acting and narration.
 * Overall plots - ignoring the major plot holes during the missions themselves, the plots were excellent all the way up to the end.
 * Most of the DLC, though the alternate appearance packs probably should have been free.
 * The environments - interiors and exteriors both were excellent. I had felt that Mass Effect did a wonderful job with the planets, but not so great with the interiors - recycling the same exact maps far too many times (honestly - how many times did we crawl through the same mine, or raid the same bunker??).  In Mass Effect 2, it seems that every location was built unique, and it was worth it.  My favourite exterior was Aite, my favourite interior... hard to say, probably the facility Jack blows up.

Least favourite things? Well, read the rants below, but for the TL:DR crowd, my number one rant is about the combat. I don't like the ammo-counting mechanic, especially since it feels like a step back from the first game. If it were truly like the way the mechanic is described (ejecting a clip to cool the unit down) I might have felt better about it, but this method artificially pinned me to using the submachine gun the most, and relying far more on powers than I wanted to.

Number 2 rant is probably the number of counter-intuitive or illogical missions - walking on a precariously balanced wrecked spaceship hull? Blowing up a pillar that could have been vaulted by a volus? Spending minutes messing around with door controls when there's a perfectly serviceable (and already broken) window right there? Bioware needs to learn the art of the alternate solution.

My number three rant? The combat. Did I mention that already? Well, that's because it pissed me off that much. Seriously, if there isn't a serious overhaul on the combat for ME3, I will probably skip it and just watch the movie instead.

Well, thanks for listening to me rant. For those keeping score at home, I give Mass Effect a 4 out of 5, or an 82% if you want the raw score. It's a good game, but I would recommend it only to friends who had already played and enjoyed the first, and only if this one were on a discount.