008Zulu said:
Now its shoot, hide, reload, shoot, hide, reload. No challenge.
I quite agree here. There were only 4 situations so far in Insanity which required a different point of thinking than this, which is disappointing. One of which involved camping a specific spot on the map where the 2 Scions couldn't shockwave me, one of which involved having Tali Zorah's Combat drone knock a scion off a moving platform, and strafing the forward most stairwell next to Legion in the Reaper (which for some reason the husks wouldn't use when they tried to chase me), and the final one was running to a cut scene because I couldn't deal with Geth Hunters with Shotguns on a very small map. It wouldn't have been a problem if Sheppard wouldn't jump out of cover for no reason.
While I missed the large number of skills you could have in ME, it felt as though the game punished you for having a low level character, though levels flowed like water into a barrel placed at the end of a storm drain during a monsoon, where as at level 60 with two heatsinks on your weapon of choice, you could literally walk around and shoot things and never die. This game (ME2) erased both those feelings. And I actually enjoyed the control layout a lot more on the 360 compared to the last game.
ME2 Also brought back my favorite part of the old Final Fantasy games. Flying around with your airship. I knew I couldn't hate a game that let me drive through suns, but I had to eventually notice everything I felt was a problem in the game.
All of the "Pure" classes made for a heavily gimped Sheppard. In my play experience the Soldier relied so much on his gun that he couldn't deal to opponents who wouldn't come out of cover, and while firing he would take a large amount of damage and have to hope the enemy didn't just Regen his shields health or armor. For this reason I felt him rely on inferno rounds the entire game... until he got an advanced power.
The engineer couldn't really deal with organics or armor without inferno (or armor piercing rounds) and the difference between biotic barriers and shields seemed to only affect this class. Meanwhile the Adept suffered largely from the global cool downs. Barrier! Now I have to wait 12 seconds to do Warp! With the system removing about half of the abilities Sheppard could have, this felt like a lemon covered in salt applied to a festering open wound.
And what's up with Barrier, Geth Shields, and Fortification doing the *exact same thing*? They're just all worse versions of Tech Armor.
I dislike regenerating health, and I dislike the cover system tat made me feel as though I was playing Gears of War. Both were minor however.
What was really disappointing in is the new criteria for level gains. It, for me, was literally, "Do a mission gain and a level or two. Side Quests are unimportant".
I had the most fun doing runs on a second playthrough of a previous ME2 character using a Sentinel with Armor Piercing Rounds. I abused Tech Armor, Tungsten Rounds with the SMG, and Warp (the only worthwhile power as even shockwave wasn't powerful enough thanks to the large amounts of shields and barriers and armor on higher difficulties). The SMG never runs out of ammo. NEVER. And with Tungsten Ammo tearing through the things the SMG is naturally weak against I found no reason to ever want to use the low capacity pistol. I used the geth pulse rifle if my target was far enough away.
My friend found Biotic Rush to be his savior as a Vanguard, he could literally use it to move across the map to the cut scene. Another friend did the same thing with the cloak from Infiltrator.
Unlike them I've only ever had to run to one cut scene.
Overall I'd still say the game is an improvement, I feel it flowed better. And Hanar are still big stupid Jellyfish.
