Mass Effect 2 E3 Previews

Even though E3 has been over for a few days already, we still have Mass Effect 2 previews to report about.

The first is at GameSpy:
The incredibly powerful alien Reapers from the first game are still out there, and humans are steadily disappearing. Commander Shepard is working with a shadowy organization called Cerberus to investigate, as humanity is in peril. While you may have chosen to play through the original Mass Effect as a paragon of virtue, the stakes have been raised and you might just have to break a few more rules this time around. To combat this menace, you'll have to recruit a team of the galaxy's most dangerous, powerful individuals.

The second is at AusGamers:
Gameplay kicked off with a dialogue scene in a flying car, speeding along with stunning visuals, the kind that would be pre-rendered cut-scenes in many a game, but this is all real-time. The conversation and its consequences are steered by the familiar set of shortened cue sentences on a dialogue wheel, all as a space-age city rushes by on your way to a mission destination. Oddly they haven't released any screenshots of character close-ups - which, due to the cinematic camera angles and pans, you see a lot of during conversation sections - so you'll just have to take my word that they look even better than the images you can see here.

The third is at Virgin Media:
As fans will remember, Mass Effect was all about defeating a rogue spectre called Saren, a Turian who turned out to be a puppet of a Reaper, mile high living space ships hell-bent on clearing out all life from the galaxy. In Mass Effect 2, the dark second act (Empire Strikes Back, anyone?), humans are going missing from all over the galaxy, and you're working with a shadowy pro-human group called Cerberus to find out why. Going after the missing humans is a suicide mission, according to Cerberus, but that doesn't put off our valiant hero. Despite how double hard Shepard is, he needs some help, so he sets off to recruit a gang of super killers from the deepest corners of the galaxy. Much of the game is focused on this, in fact. On finding them, equipping them and making them loyal. Then you command them on a final mission where your actions throughout the game will affect your team's success or failure at every stage.

The fourth is at GameDaily:
"In Mass Effect 2, you're not expected to survive," Hudson says, so it's important to build a strong team of allies that will watch your back and can perform under pressure. Meet people across the galaxy and decide to recruit them to be a part of your team.

And the fifth is at Button Masher:
Another change from the previous game is that special abilities can be used in real time and assigned to buttons, the power wheel is still there and you can choose to use this which pauses the game while doing so, but the option to play a more fast paced style of offense while still using multiple abilities is open. The accuracy of fire is also something that has been changed, there is no levelling in this aspect, you are only as good, or as bad, as your aim.