Fight me, nerds.
EDIT: Okay, I’m not in a rush to get back to playing Psychonauts: Rhombus of Ruin now, so let me elaborate. Mass Effect 2 is a game I despise, for a lot of reasons. It occasionally hits a few right marks with its story, most notably in Omega when slowly introducing the characters. However, the entire plot of the game feels like a spinoff or DLC mission rather than any kind of main entry; the Collectors just don’t feel like a threat. They are never established as a true, galactic threat, but rather an old danger you happen to suddenly care about now. Then, you expect me to take these mildly annoyed bugs as the successor to REAPERS?
So many underused plot threads from ME1… the sudden rise in Earth’s power, the political turmoil, and most notably, The Illusive Man. So little was done with the Cerberus line. While I hoped throughout the entire game that it would get interesting, that your choices would continue to put you at odds with the Illusive Man and eventually make him turn on you, instead he just remains your friend. Even the Council was more hostile!
That’s not even getting into the way it gutted ME1’s deep combat. Yes, ME1 has problems… but its combat, as a whole, feels great, unique, and almost like a strategy game. ME2 throws away everything with retconning heatsinks for “thermal clips” (no more managing heat), generic weapon mechanics with gimped loadout systems, and regenerating health. ME3 feels like a step in the right direction and a functional version of ME2, but I’ll always hate ME2 nonetheless for being the game that ruined Mass Effect’s once-deep RPG mechanics. That’s not even getting into the way they butchered biotics.
For a less controversial opinion, I’ll cast my vote on ME: Andromeda because I can’t think of anything else at the moment. I’ve been playing Psychonauts: Rhombus of Ruin for so long that I can’t even think about bad games anymore.
Is Mass Effect actually the worst game? No, but it’s a bland bundle of really cool concepts that’ll make you more frustrated [in the sense of “THIS COULD HAVE BEEN SO COOL!”] than possibly enjoyed. The combat is good and the RPG mechanics are flawless, but the writing can only be described as amateur fanfic garbage. Every good idea it has going for it is underused, and there’s no point in playing a game with bland but serviceable sidecontent when every aspect of the main storyline, the thing that Mass Effect derives its fame from, has been thoroughly botched.
So, without further ado, the mark of shame goes to… this thing!
