Mass Effect 2

Holds all the way up. Mass Effect was thrown fresh into my memory by the reaction my Twitter feed had to GQ publishing a list earlier this month of the top 100 games of all time, as voted on by a range of industry professionals. This ranked at #6, and that seemed to be the major complaint people had about the list - I saw a number of people saying that it only continued to enjoy its reputation because it was lucky enough to come out at a time when most AAA console games were bland and mediocre, and time hadn't been kind to it, leaving it feeling like a fairly average third-person shooter by modern standards. I can't comment on the first part of that statement - I wasn't paying attention to video games at all in 2010, or the few years leading up to it - but the second part nagged at me, because that's not even close to the game I remember playing. But in fairness, it has been almost exactly ten years since I last touched the original Mass Effect trilogy, so maybe there was something in that?

Yeah....no. This is still absolutely brilliant. Frankly I didn't realise until I started replaying this that I'd sort of forgotten just how much of a joy getting truly lost in a video game universe can be. I absolutely adored getting to re-know old friends like Tali, Garrus, Liara, Kasumi, and Aria, and finding out that I could still find my way around the Citadel and Omega. I found relaxation in exploring the galaxy map, warmth in my interactions with every faction and species (even on the krogan homeworld of Tuchanka, where you can essentially adopt a varren), and a genuinely gripping sense of suspense in the final mission - to say nothing of the fluidity and versatility of the gameplay. (I can just about understand how somebody could come away from this thinking it's a plain third-person shooter, but honestly, that's a skills issue; maybe pick a better character class and investigate what the other shoulder buttons do next time?) Before returning to it I would have unflinchingly said that Mass Effect 2 was one of the very best games I'd ever played, but having replayed it I worry that even a statement like that might not be going far enough; literally all I want to do at this point is play more games like this, find more universes to explore, meet more interesting types of guy along the way. It made me feel more invigorated than I have done in months. I've replayed quite a lot of old favourites recently, but this feels different: while the Danganronpa [ダンガンロンパ] trilogy made me fall in love with Danganronpa specifically and Persona 4 made me fall in love with Inaba and its inhabitants, Mass Effect has made me rediscover my love for video games as a whole.

(And for what it's worth, as we're talking about games picking up an unfair reputation upon release that they never end up getting rid of, I would argue that a far bigger failing of the GQ list was that the first Mass Effect game made the cut and the third one, which is even better than this, didn't....)