Zero Punctuation

Great writing but the conversations are boring? Wut?

 

Lucky for him it was more or less a good review. Sadly he picked up many of the glaringly bad things about the game: The Hammerhead vehicle shoud have been included, and the planet scanning is most definitely bleah after a first playthrough.

 

Combat too easy? Did he play it on anything above Veteran?

I can't see it either. The Escapist and my ISP have issues.

 

Yeah, I figured he played it only once and maybe only on Casual difficulty at that, because that's as easy as combat gets there.

 

His comments on scanning planets are lol.

 

I think in any RPG you're always going to have a bit of tedium.

 

But it's jarringly tedious. They did away with pretty much every form of timesink ME1 had (inventory management, upgrades, random planet roaming), changed the sidemissions from the same 3 locations to entirely unique ones and focused much more on the combat ... and then we're doing a slow boring 3rd rate minigame 300 times?
I've recently reinstalled the Star Wars Galaxies Emu Project and am grinding a crafter who needs to scan the planets for his resources on foot - and it's a thousand times more enjoyable.

I'm just glad I found a savegame editor so I can completely ignore the scanning in all future ME2 playthroughs. I'm looking forward to the pillar of stupidity they have in mind for ME3.

 

I don't think it necessarily bad that they got rid of a lot of the time sinks, I didn't especially enjoy the inventory management all that much and think the new system is good, it could just use a few more weapons and it would be cool to actually customize your weapons.

It isn't a perfect 10 game, but overall it is the best game of my favorite genre. He pointed out some of the main faults, but they don't ruin the game, and they aren't even things that were overlooked by Bioware, but were choices they made due to them being limited by time and resources. The one thing I think is a little unfair was the disconnect between character animations and voice acting. I thought they did very good, far better than any other video game I've played, but obviously it isn't going to compare to Avatar.

I was never one to really hate on the Mako, it was mostly frustrating because it has so much potential to be awesome but came up short. And instead of throwing in something that wasn't ready they took it out. It's not like they forgot about it.

The planet scanning didn't really bother me too much until the end of my first playthrough, but it certainly isn't something I look forward to repeating. I think they narrowed down the open world environment to focus on the story and gameplay experience, but while it made it a very good experience the first time you go through it, the lack of open worlds to explore hamper replayability.

I don't think the shooting is boring, and normal was a bit easy for an experienced gamer and I am not usually one to try to challenge myself. But I suspect he played through as a soldier, which I'm sure is a snore on normal, because using biotics is just fun.

 

Arguably, the planet scanning for resources thing could've been done better. It is simply far too tedious to the point of quickly sending you into a snoozefest after a few minutes.
I'm one of the few that almost misses the Mako. Though it handled like crap, it's far more alluring to drive around an alien landcape, not knowing what you'd find once you reached those markers in your mini-map, which could be either decent loot or a Geth or Thresher Maw ambush. And the destructive power of the Mako's gun was always win for me. Neither do I miss the hideous inventory system from ME1; what they did in ME2 was a step in the right direction that could further be refined.

Yeah, the sequel feels less RPGy than the first game, but not to the point of breaking the game nor letting you forget that it's more of a shooting RPG now.

 

Been a while since this thread has been updated. Here are some recent reviews:

Red Dead Redemption
Alan Wake
God of War III
Red Steel 2
Heavy Rain
Final Fantasy XIII

 

His analyses of helicopter controls in Gay Tony and walking through a door in RDR are hilariously spot on.

 

Yahtzee reviews DeathSpank and Limbo