msas effcet 2 is pretty okay. all the shooting stuff is grounded in pretty good mechanics. the enemies having some or all of three different defenses works well, because you have different guns and abilities that deal with them to varying degrees of success. since it’s unlikely that you alone will be able to deal with all of them very well, using teammate abilities is actually important, which is good. the game is at its best when you’ve turned off teammate autocasting and you’re switching between enemies and using appropriate attacks while managing the cooldown between three separate characters as well as your own ammunition level and choice of weapon. this works really, really well because it’s not just mindless like most cover shooters, and you feel like combat is more based on intelligence than twitching or even aim.
it isn’t perfect though. early on the game shows you how to order your two cronies into specific positions. you never ever have to do this ever again though (in fact i actually forgot about it until i went back and played it a bit again). this is for two reasons. one, your allies don’t need to have line of sight to anything to use an ability on it. this is stupid. if i have to have line of sight to use an ability i expect that same ability to work the same way for every other character in the world. what they should have done is have the teammates remember your order if they can’t do it immediately, and then fire the ability when they actually get a shot. this would make you have to think more about tactical positioning, which right now you do not have to think about at all except for your own character.
the second reason is that your allies don’t die very easily, so when they go down it’s usually late in the fight when most of the enemies are already dead or weak and easy to pick off. plus, when your allies do go down, they aren’t dead, you can wait until the fight is over and they come back. or you can use a medpack which you find roughly fifty bajillion of per level to revive them in the middle of a fight, from anywhere. it’d be cooler if you actually had to get to them to use it because you wouldn’t be so cavalier about sending them in to die. it would also be cool if failing to get to them in a certain amount of time just had them flat-out die. at least for the rest of the mission. you’d have to play way more carefully. as it is you don’t really have to care about your allies until they’re on the ground and unable to cast spells.
i like that while many of the enemies are easy to deal with some are just fuck-off hard. the krogans in particular always annoyed the fuck out of me and that means they were doing a good job as enemies because i was being challenged. the mechs would be better in this regard if they weren’t so easy to kite, or if there were just less cover to abuse this tactic with. some of the bosses are ungodly pains in the ass and again, this is good. they aren’t just recycled normal enemies with lots of hp (hi alen waek).
the combat sections in sams ecfeft 2 are really linear. this isn’t necessarily bad. lots of good shooters are linear, and msma effcte does it generally right. there’s little ‘secret’ rooms and areas sprinkled pretty liberally around that are just off the beaten path but which reward you with upgrade resources, which is good because it feels like you’re contributing to your overall meta-development beyond any one particular skirmish. sometimes these require minigames to access. they aren’t terrible, nor are they long, but i do have to wonder why they were included. they aren’t like, ‘fun.’ i’m guessing bioware put them in as a pacing thing, so you wouldn’t get too much action all at once. too bad i’m not a fucking grandmother, bioware.
there’s parts where you just kinda wander around cities and terminals and crap looking for quests and going to shops. this is pretty normal for rpgs, but that doesn’t excuse it. these parts are really boring. why should i have to load a goddam level just to run for 45 seconds to a shop? why can’t i just access that shop from the overworld screen? maybe the MY IMMERSION!!! crowd appreciated having to run around for no reason, but they also probably appreciate warm weather. so you can’t see them breathing out their mouths
the absolute worst part of the game is the planet mining. i’m not really sure what the appeal is even supposed to be. if i wanted to rotate around a planet and click on random parts of it, i would buy a globe and a shitload of thumbtacks and go hog wild. there is no reason for this to be a part of the game you actually have to do. it’s just busywork, and who has the patience.
the dialogue is just barely worth talking about. it’s a bioware rpg. in any given conversation you get three choices which is sometimes made to look like more than three choices.
___________________
Be a good guy (end the conversation)
Get more information
Be a bad guy (end the conversation)
___________________
Bioware, creating innovative rpgs since 1996. the only problem is it’s been the same innovative rpg since then. anyway, this is only worth mentioning because sometimes during these interminable tracts of sperglord ranting, you can click to do a ‘good guy action’ or a ‘bad guy action.’ but this isn’t really very interesting because you aren’t really doing anything, nor do you know exactly what will happen when you do it, so you don’t really have any business feeling responsible for whatever manufactured cool thing your guy does.
if you took out the mining, simplified the town shit, maybe took out the minigames, and sharpened up the combat, you’d have a pretty good game here.
