#MASS EFFECT 2 LEGENDARY EDITION SERIES#

Instead, BioWare loaded its toolbox and went to town on fixing up the first game, which most fans agree is mechanically the weakest by a large margin.

#MASS EFFECT 2 LEGENDARY EDITION SERIES#

Mass Effect's story is what people generally remember the series for, but it's completely unchanged in the new remasters. You'll do a lot of this throughout the trilogy.

Sometimes diplomacy doesn't work, though, and third-person shooter combat kicks in. Having also played through much of the Mass Effect 2 remaster with an imported save, I've also gotten a kick out of running into minor characters I wouldn't have expected to show up past the first game and finding out how my choices affected them in the interim. I get a little bit of a rush every time a decision I made resurfaces 10 hours later in a surprising way. The big selling point in 2007 (and still now) was that your choices would carry forward not only to later in this game, but into the sequels as well. Whether Shepard is a paragon of diplomacy or a violent renegade is up to you, and this applies not only to story missions where you run and around and fight on exotic alien planets but also to friendly conversations with your ship's crewmates. The bulk of the gameplay is centered around dialogue sequences where you can choose the tenor of Shepard's responses. Your vessel is the totally sick SSV Normandy (think of it as your own personal USS Enterprise) and your main tools are both your guns and your words. Shepard's job in the first game is to mediate all manner of disputes on behalf of the Council and the human-centric Systems Alliance, ranging from minor personal squabbles on the city streets of the Citadel to long-standing conflicts between races who have been at each other's throats for longer than humans have known there was even life outside of Earth. That means most of the other races (many of which have been spacefaring for centuries or even millennia) don't exactly trust us and aren't huge fans of our rapid ascension through the galactic ranks.

Humans are the upstart new kids on the block, having just made first contact about 30 years prior. Credit: biowareДЄ quick primer for the uninitiated: Mass Effect tells the story of Commander Shepard, a player-created agent of the multi-racial governing body for the entire Milky Way galaxy, known as the Citadel Council. Some of the new exterior lighting is great. Having finished the first game in the collection, I can confidently say there isn't a better way for first-timers to hop on the bandwagon, but you should know going in that nearly a decade and a half of hindsight and political awakening haven't been kind to major aspects of this trilogy. Minus some irrelevant DLC from the first game and Mass Effect 3's multiplayer mode, everything is here in upgraded glory.

One stellar sequel, a controversial trilogy ending, and a failed reboot we don't need to talk about later, Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is here to bring some of that magic back in the form of enhanced remasters of the first three games in developer BioWare's hit series. Needless to say, a shined up re-release was always going to be right up my alley. I was just a fresh-faced 13-year-old who didn't know anything about the world, but I had a healthy appetite for video games and access to the first title in what would become one of the most celebrated trilogies in the medium's history. Harrowing as it is to confront this fact, it's been almost 15 years since I last touched the original Mass Effect.

Mass effect 2 legendary edition