Remember how I said I wanted to be a resource surveyor? I take it back. Yahtzee did not do justice to how boring surveying planets is. Resources are invisible, so the “game” consists of moving the cursor back and forth over a sphere, waiting for the controller to rumble and the resource meter to peak. It’s like you’re a kid short of money, and the universe is full of lawns you must mow.
On the other hand, the way he characterizes combat is bullshit. Yes, you can win a couple of the early combats with nothing but the sniper rifle, but by the time you get to Horizon, you’ve seen a lot of combats where this is really not a good idea. Either he was playing on an easier difficulty level (I’m playing Veteran) or he reviewed the game before hitting anything difficult. Early on I was feeling like it was a little too easy, but I’ve since run in to several combats where I really had to pull out all the stops to stay alive.
GregB
3502
That’s his thing, isn’t it. He rarely plays for more than a few hours. Just enough to rag on the obvious stuff. His critique ought to be viewed as entertainment and little else. To be honest, I find his schtick is wearing a little thin.
I think the world really needs someone who points out the really awful stuff without pulling punches. I can’t believe the number of positive reviews I’ve seen on sites like Gamespot of truly terrible games, like GrimGrimoire. I find it slightly preposterous that “7 out of 10” is usually a bad game, since the grading scale is so inflated. He’s said quite a lot of things about JRPGs that I appreciate.
While it’s true he fills a need, you can’t generally take his critiques as serious reviews, since the only thing he does well is sneer, so he occasionally sneers at games that really don’t deserve it. I’m fine with that, I’m just a bit put out when he says something that is outright not true.
Quitch
3504
I believe he broke down how long he spends, and it’s three days per game.
Like many reviewers, I suspect he’s playing on Normal to ensure he sees enough of the game to comment.
Lynxara
3505
I tend to ignore the way Yahtzee characterizes combat in games. I don’t think it’s ever actually been accurate. This just seems to be an aspect of game design he puts little thought into.
Or maybe he’s just better then you
Uh-huh. That’s a fairly idiotic thing to say. Not because I’m awesome, but because the sniper rifle is just not capable of doing enough damage by itself to end most combats once you get out of the early missions. It only holds 10 shots, and won’t one-shot kill enemies with shields, armor, or both.
It’s actually pretty easy to be “good” with the sniper rifle if you’re playing a Soldier, since the time-dilation skill lets you get headshots without much effort. It seems like an all-powerful weapon early on when you’re facing 2-3 guys at a time and it’s getting one-shot kills. Later on, you encounter stuff against which the assault rifle is a much smarter choice.
I just thought it was funny that the fact that he found the combat easy could only be because he didn’t play it properly.
If he’d just said combat was easy, you’d have a point. What he said was that he killed all the enemies with a sniper rifle before his teammates could get close enough to get off a shot. That’s really not possible, no matter how skilled you are, past the first few intro missions. It doesn’t hold enough ammunition to do that, let alone the issues of fire rate and the number of opponents you face, and it’s not an effective weapon against many of the bosses.
I’m guessing you haven’t actually played the game.
I played an Infiltrator on Hard and found combat to be pretty much as Yahtzee described it. Sure, there isn’t much sniper ammo, but when I ran out I always swapped to my heavy pistol which was pretty much a minisniper minus scope. Most of the game played like a shooting gallery.
I guess I can’t comment on relative distance of teammates to enemies factored into time of engagement divided by ammo limit in relation to shots fired, but that’s because 1) I hardly ever cared what my teammates were doing and 2) that’s getting way too asinine for picking apart a ZP review.
No, I haven’t.
But I’m pretty sure that Yathzee would totally pwn you in ME2
This is exactly what I did in the final mission in the game. Sorry.
Njal
3513
What difficulty are you on? I’ve done it on insanity and although it’s not too hard as a soldier there are many missions where the sniper rifle isn’t a good choice. Like say the derelict reaper and any other mission with charging hordes. I found hardcore as an adept to be tougher than insanity as a soldier.
Gus you do know that with the final sniper rifle you get in the Collecter ship combined with an ammo power and upgrades one shots pretty much everything, Infiltrator is argueably the best/easiest class to play through with for this very reason
Pogo
3515
I don’t know why in the world someone would argue about a Yahtzee point. He takes an aspect that holds a small bit of truth and then exaggerates it so that he can put funny images up on a screen. There’s really no reason to read into it.
You keep arguing points I’m not making.
I haven’t gotten that far yet. I just received the first sniper rifle upgrade on Ilium, which adds so much ammunition storage that using a sniper rifle exclusively now looks more viable. It may be that I was wrong, and there’s just a short period when you’re stuck with the original Mantis and the missions are harder where you can’t really take that approach.
I chose Soldier for my first play through based on my experience with Mass Effect 1, where it was the smart thing to do because it unlocked weapons as additional skills for later builds. I gather they’ve done away with that system entirely, so I should really have gone with whatever suited me closest, which is probably Infiltrator.
I do like that the Sniper Rifle is a more viable weapon in Mass Effect 2. In the original game, it was rarely of much value unless you were outdoors.
You accused Yahtzee of not playing the game very long based on your mistaken impressions formed by not playing the game very long?
My experience was like this:
Watch Yahtzee’s review.
Start playing Mass Effect 2, with his comments about being able to kill everything rapidly at long distance before his teammates could get close enough to shoot in mind.
Be impressed with how the sniper rifle is actually useful indoors, compared to Mass Effect 1. The very first mission it’s pretty much the weapon of choice.
Find it’s not so useful in later missions. Once the difficulty starts ramping up, there are a lot of combats where you have to engage at shorter distances, where there are more enemies than the Mantis has bullets, and where the tougher enemies don’t take as much damage from the Mantis. The teammates definitely have plenty of time to engage, since the Mantis has a low rate of fire (1 shot before reloading).
After about a dozen missions like this, call bullshit on Yahtzee’s characterization of combat.
Finish Horizon, which is a major transition mission, the one that prompts you to switch discs after you finish. Run a couple of missions on Ilium and encounter the Viper sniper rifle, which has 12 shots per clip and allows 60 rounds total, but does less damage per hit.
With the Viper, you can definitely finish many of the trivial combats with 3-4 enemies by shooting them all in the head rapidly. I imagine it’s easier to do this if you’re playing Infiltrator rather than Solider. But I still think it’s BS to describe serious combats with 10+ enemies and tougher targets the way Yahtzee did. Your teammates will definitely be contributing to those.
Sorry Gus I had presumed you had played through the whole game, my bad. The Viper is a significant upgrade and it is after you get it that sniping becomes a much more viable tactic. The reason people are raving so much over the SR is because as you mentioned its just a hell of a lot more useful now then it was in the first game. It still does crazy damage and your actually able to use it in normal firefights.
With where you are in the game now you should start getting some crazy assualt rifles for your Soldier, in which case you’ll be soon wondering why you even bother carrying around other weapons.
Soldier and Infiltrator are now the best classes by far in the game due to how they overhauled combat and skill development using overpowered AR and SR respectively.
I just finished the Collector ship, and took the sniper rifle since you mentioned it here. So far I haven’t seen a third level assault rifle yet, other than the one the collector ship offered me.
I really do think which weapon is best is situational, is it should be. The sniper rifle is often good, which is a big improvement over Mass Effect 1, but there are times the assault rifle makes more sense. What surprises me is that the shotgun never seems useful, even when you’re being charged by husks. It just doesn’t do enough damage even at fairly close range.
I agree the two weapons classes (Soldier and Infiltrator) seem to be the best now, as opposed to Adept + Assault Rifle skill being the ideal in Mass Effect 1. The fact that lift, err “pull” doesn’t work on enemies with either armor or shields relegates it to a minor enemy crowd control skill, instead of the combat-dominating skill it was in Mass Effect 1.
Combat really is a lot better, at least in part because enemies no longer run up to give you a group hug. I’m certainly not finding it disappointing, though it did seem a little too easy at first.
