Mass Effect 2

I used some of my birthday money to get Mass Effect 2 for the XBox 360. It's been fun getting into the highly detailed world of this game again. So far though, I haven't had a lot of time, so I've just barely scratched the surface.

My first impressions are that the game is well done, and I'm stoked to be able to bring my character and her decisions from the first game. However, I do have some gripes. One is that as soon as you complete the objective for a mission, you are whisked back to your home base. On one mission I was given an optional submission. I came to a fork in the paths I could take. I decided to go one way and then come back and finish whatever was left undone. The path I chose ended up being the path to complete the main mission. Once I finished it, I could no longer go back to the area and finish the other mission. This is highly lame. Now that I know it is the case, I will be more careful, but it shouldn't be the case.

Another complaint is the controls can be rather frustrating. I imagine this will fade with time as I become more proficient, but one firefight recently left me hopping mad, literally. My character would jump up on top of the item I was trying to hide behind. When behind cover, my character would spasmodically pop out of cover and back in when I tried to fire my weapon, but without ever firing a shot. In other attempts on this firefight (and there were many), the character would also take cover on the wrong side of a crate or column and be crouching right in enemy fire.

Also frustrating is that targeting of enemies, especially by members of your squad can lead to a lot of wasted effort. If an enemy is obscured from my vision, but in clear view of the other squad members, I can target the enemies with my squad's powers, but the squad members end up firing their attacks at the point in the wall my character was staring at, rather than the enemy behind it that I highlighted. It also took a while to learn that sometimes my character won't even directly attack enemies when I tell her to if the enemies are partially obscured. After some screaming and jumping up and down, I finally got through that firefight, though I may have partially traumatized Jen with my reactions to the frustration.

I think I'm suffering a bit from overhyping of the game. Everyone's told me it is so freaking awesome. So far it has not wowed me, mainly due to the aforementioned issues. The story is compelling, and I'm just at the beginning, but it still has to completely win me over.