Mass Effect 2

 Just to get the obligatory out of the way, yes, Russia's assault on Ukraine continues, with Russia targeting civilians among other Geneva Convention violations, while all we're doing in response that's showing to be at all effective is giving some limited military hardware assistance to the Ukrainians.  So, same as it's been for months, really.

So, Mass Effect 2... I finished it last week, while I was stuck in the house on COVID quarantine.  All in all, it was decidedly okay.  Combat-wise, the switch to bullet/clip mechanics wasn't terrible, and getting rid of the version/strength concept on the various weapons made sense (and made it a lot easier to find and use the weapons you actually preferred).  Exploration-wise, greatly reducing the ground-vehicle sections made sense, and implementing a planetary scanner system for materials location and extraction worked well (although why you would need to do that manually on a ship with a dedicated AI never made much sense).  Story-wise, it doesn't really live up to the potential promised by its introductory missions - you go from literal resurrection to work for Cerberus, a shady human-supremacist organization, to gathering a huge team (that you can only ever use two of at a time in your squad), to doing side-missions for those team members so that they will actually use all of their skills rather than sandbagging on you, to more side-missions showing terrible things being by Cerberus locations (but never at the behest of the main organization, just by individuals trying to meet performance goals imposed by the main organization), to murdering hundreds of thousands or millions of non-allied sentients to defend the rest of the galaxy (yes, there's no way around it), to a final "suicide mission" and climatic boss battle.  Of course, it's during that final mission that you discover that the Reapers (the big-bads from ME1, who also control the Collectors, the initial big-bads from ME2) aren't quite entirely mechanical, and are using the genetics of humanity (and others?) for reproduction, which, okay, ew.  But then, they use that as justification to make the final boss fight basically your squad against a giant mecha-baby, which struck me as an incredibly weak climax.

With that, the final scoring to date has ME1 as an entirely-skippable B-grade movie sort of affair, while ME2 is an okay game, hampered by some forced choices and a weak ending.  I did decide to start up a game of ME3 after I finished ME2, but... I think I'm going to have to back-burner that for a while.  I just can't get into the initial conceit of "you were on house arrest for genocide for several months, but now you're back, reinstated into both the human military and the Alliance's Specter corps, toodling around the galaxy chasing the means to fight back while the Reapers (the inexorable destroyers that are not only more advanced/powerful than the entire galaxy combined, but capable of converting the conquered directly into fighters for their side) are currently attacking everybody simultaneously, yet somehow not wiping the floor with them all instantly."  Even if there weren't this whole Russia-Ukraine thing going on right now, that's a hearty bit of disbelief you're asking me to suspend there.

Instead, I'm going back to the XBox One backlog for a bit.  I left off at the Halo Master Chief Collection before, but I'm going to set that aside for now - I don't need another shooter at the moment, and I've heard they're looking to retrofit micro-transactions in there somehow, which would be a hard pass.  Next after that would be Hand of Fate 2, a follow-up to a very entertaining game, which I think I left off because I wasn't up for the grind needed to proceed.  Well, we'll see how it goes this time.