Mass Effect 2

Shepherd and his crew are back to save the galaxy... again.

One of the cruellest things you can endure in the business of reviewing games is the hands-on preview session. You get a few hours to play a game, tooling around different encounters to see the various aspects of the game, and then it's over. It's like getting someone addicted to crack and then telling they can't have any more.

But worse. Much, much worse.

Especially when the game in question is Mass Effect 2, possibly the most anticipated RPG ever, and even more especially when Mass Effect 2 is looking so... damn... good.

We recently got to have a brief chat and listen to Dr Greg Zeschuk, one of BioWare's founders, as he talked us through not just Mass Effect 2 but Dragon Age: Origins as well. He's a great guy - passionate about games and his games in particular, but that mustn't be too much of challenge when you've got a track record like BioWare's. The company just doesn't make bad games.

"We've made a lot of engine changes," he says as he starts getting warmed up over ME2, "fiddled with the lighting and stuff. And there's a lot more detail on the armour, for instance. It's just a better looking game overall."

He's not lying, either. We got to see three segments of gameplay, one featuring some classic ME running and gunning, and the graphics are pumped up across the board. Those annoyingly grainy shadows are long gone, the details is a vast improvement, and the devs have really gone to town on the camera work.

If the original was cinematic, this one is cinematic in the extreme. The best example of this is during the much more organic conversation sequences. These are no longer two-camera interview-style setups; instead, a far defter camera sweeps around the protagonists, cutting dramatically or panning slowly. The sense of filmic gravitas is wonderfully maintained, helped again by some top notch voice acting and some very adult scripting.

And, since this is space opera at its most operatic, the action's been ramped up significantly. Weapons now have holographic ammo counters, which is likely going to replace the cooling mechanic of the original. The rest of your squad is much easier to order round, and seem to be generally more effective at using their powers even if you don't micromanage them.

It's pretty much a case of everything that made the PC version better being re-implemented into all of the ME2 releases, but the biggest change would have to be access to heavy weapons. We got to play with a homing missile launcher that was, well, an absolute blast.

As to the story, well, Greg was a lot more tight-lipped about that, though we can say Sheperd featured in each segment we played. "If the first game was all about the high end of politics in the Mass Effect universe, this one's about the dark side," Dr Zeschuk told us. The main quest hub is a criminal zone, and there's a much darker threat in play. And what about Sheperd's much reported death?

"Well," Zeschuk said, "You'll just have to wait and see."

And we can't wait.