Mass Effect 2 is all about the Suicide Mission

Mass Effect 2 begins with a bang.

In the original Mass Effect, the first part of trilogy of sci-fi action RPGs from BioWare, you’re tasked with stopping a threat to the galaxy. As Commander Shepard, you fly from planet to planet to hunt down the threat in humanity’s most advanced starship before finally saving the day.

The sequel begins with the destruction of that ship and your character left for dead.

Released 15 years ago for the Xbox 360 to widespread critical acclaim, Mass Effect 2 remains one of my favorite games. The (literally) explosive intro grabbed me from the start, but it’s how the game ends that makes it stand out.

Shepard is rescued from the wreckage and put on the trail of the Collectors, an alien race wiping out human colonies — the same aliens that so easily destroyed your ship. They reside in a star system that nobody’s ever returned from. It’s a suicide mission; in fact, that’s what the game calls it. You spend the bulk of the game preparing yourself and your team, and when you’re finally ready, you take on the seemingly impossible task of the Suicide Mission.

Here’s the thing: all that sounds pretty clichéd, right? Impossible missions. Unbeatable aliens. I mean, a lot of games build up their big bad guy. A lot of games talk about how the final mission is going to be really, really tough. It’s probably not the first game to throw around the words “suicide mission” to make something sound really difficult — even if it isn’t actually deadly.

Well, Mass Effect 2’s Suicide Mission lives up to the name. Depending on how you play it, any (or all) of Shepard’s squad can die.

This matters because the central hook of the Mass Effect trilogy is that the decisions you make in one game affects the next. It’s not uncommon for other games to allow players to make major, branching decisions. It’s rare for games to carry those choices over to the sequel. It’s unheard of to do this across a trilogy, let alone making it the foundational element.

The Mass Effect trilogy gives you the freedom to shape Commander Shepard however you want: be good, be bad, be helpful, be an ass — whatever it takes. But there are repercussions. Piss someone off, and they may return in a future game with a grudge. And yes, if one of your team dies, they stay dead: fail to save someone in Mass Effect 2’s Suicide Mission and they will not appear when you play Mass Effect 3.

With the lives of so many major characters on the line, the Suicide Mission plays a major role in shaping not just how this one game plays out, but the trilogy as a whole. And Mass Effect 2 uses a unique structure to keep the Suicide Mission looming large at all times.

Most games — indeed, most stories — take meandering paths. Heroes set out either alone or in a small group intent on fighting evil. Along the way, the journey takes them to unexpected places and they gain surprising new allies, some of whom initially acted as antagonists, before reluctantly teaming up with you to face the greater threat. Of course, by the end of the journey, that tenuous alliance has been replaced by genuine friendship, and the party you’ve cobbled together almost by accident takes down the big bad boss.

Mass Effect 2 doesn’t do this. You’re told about the Suicide Mission early on, and you spend the bulk of the game recruiting specific people to your team and preparing them for it.

That might sound simple or boring, but I found it refreshing. You’re not bumbling along, swept up in someone else’s grand adventure. You’re a professional doing a job. And of the people you set out to recruit, you get almost all of them; only two (possibly three, but that’s a spoiler) of your final squad wasn’t on the original list.

Look, I’m not expecting realism in my space opera, okay? But this grounds the story. And by following a more realistic path, it feels markedly different to other games. It makes sense that you want specific individuals with the skills you need instead of the genre trope of saving civilization with a few random people you happened to bump into along the way.

It also keeps the focus squarely on the Suicide Mission. Your quest for the right people (and only the right people) underscores how serious the mission is and how large the stakes are; being told you cannot settle for second best is a reminder of the difficulty of the task.

Building up a large party might feel redundant in another game, but another genre trope that Mass Effect 2 avoids is that you actually need every one of the whopping 12 squad members for the Suicide Mission. You might say well, yeah, of course you do — that’s why you recruited them! But that’s not really how other games work.

Players rarely use everyone in their RPG parties. There always comes a point where you end up with more party members than you actually need. Eventually, you find an ideal balance that suits your play style, which leads you to prioritize building up a few characters — and leaving others to languish.

That doesn’t happen here. Everyone is needed for the Suicide Mission; everyone plays a part, which is something I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced in a game like this before.

None of this buildup would matter if the Suicide Mission doesn’t deliver. And like the game as a whole, it begins with a bang.

As soon as you arrive in the Collector’s home star system, your ship is attacked. If you didn’t purchase three seemingly optional upgrades to your ship, up to three party members will die right there. You haven’t even entered the base and you may have suffered casualties already.

Final missions can be tricky. Ideally, they should be the ultimate test of all you’ve learned and experienced over your time playing. Some games take this as an opportunity to just throw lots of enemies at you, driving the difficulty up to unfair levels. Others circumvent that by trying to be too clever, introducing new mechanics as a surprise twist — but in doing so, they make things too different. This deprives players of using the skills they’ve accumulated for the final battle.

Mass Effect 2 strikes the right balance. The Suicide Mission is difficult, but not unfairly so. And it does introduce a new gameplay mechanic — but it’s one thematically in line with the game and taps into your experience, rather than surprising you.

When you enter the Collector Base, you’re given choices. You need to choose a tech specialist to crawl through vents and hack open doors, and you need to choose a squad leader to lead a second fire team (you lead the first, of course). This is the first time you’re ever asked to make a choice like this or split your team up. Various party members will offer their opinions; being the heroic sort, some will even volunteer. But you need to think about their characters, think about the time you’ve spent and what you know about them to make the right choice. If you don’t, they die.

You’ll face more choices over the course of the Suicide Mission, repeatedly facing the prospect of losing more teammates. There is a flow chart listing all of the possible choices and consequences; for the sake of spoilers, I’ve blanked out the details, but it gives you an idea of how intricate it is. (You can find the unaltered original here.)

The Mass Effect trilogy was remastered and re-released for modern consoles a few years back, so if you haven’t played it — or if you did back in the day, and you want to give it another go — you can.

The whole trilogy is a delight. I haven’t touched on the fun characters like Wrex and Mordin. Or the depth of the lore underpinning the world. The great sights and set-pieces. And seeing how the decisions you make, whether major or seemingly insignificant, ripple across from game to game is truly special. By the end of the trilogy, I promise you’ll have a list of your own special moments to rattle off.

But it’s the Suicide Mission, and the way Mass Effect 2 orients itself around this one epic level, that remains the highlight of the trilogy.