Mass Effect 2 Previews

Star Wars: The Old Republic isn't the only game BioWare is busy promoting - they've also been giving hands-on demonstrations of Mass Effect 2, which in turn has spawned a couple of new previews.

GamePro starts us off:
After gearing up, we underwent yet another recruitment mission with Commander Shepard, towing along Jacob Taylor, our ME2 human sidekick, and the recently acquired Thane, assassin-for-hire and flagship member of the Drell race. As soon as the mission began, we were given a directive to track down Samara, a dangerous and much-talked-about Justicar (essentially the equivalent of a Spectre) who provides a stark contrast from the peace-loving and gentle-natured Asari that we're familiar with in Liara T'Soni. Apparently, Samara was a dark legend among the Asari, known as a ruthless combatant whose mere name seemed to make the local population start breaking out in nervous sweats. Luckily for us, that's exactly the kind of crewmember that Commander Shepard's been looking for to take out the Collectors that have been harvesting humans. Glancing at a nearby police barricade, we could tell that she was probably in the area.

And then we make a stop over at The Lost Gamer:
A further criticism of the previous title was the disappointing automatic cover system that never really did itself justice in responding in the way that players intended within their game styles. Within Mass Effect 2, this has received a complete overhaul with Hudson explaining that (In Mass Effect 1, again in terms of incorporating feedback, we noticed when we watch people play it they would play it like the way you might play Halo, where you strafe around, you tuck yourself behind cover and then move back out, and then they would move to a level sliding against objects in Mass Effect 1 we had automatic cover, it would pull you into the cover automatically. You would see people accidentally getting stuck in cover.) In terms of how it has been improved, he continues to describe that the team (made cover more of an active system where you hit A to engage it. Now you can slide in and out of cover without engaging cover, and it's smooth, but you also just tap A to put yourself into cover behind the object. That's helped a lot too, plus the entire animation system is different for the way you move in combat and everything, so it's just smoother.)