But! If you want to know the truth about Project Lazarus, Commander Shepard's killed-in-action status, and your allegiances in Mass Effect 2, I encourage you to keep on readin'.
Remember that initial teaser trailer from earlier this year, the one that was all "Shepard KIA" and everything? That wasn't smoke and mirrors. It wasn't the Citadel helping Shepard pull a vanishing act in order to go undercover, like I suspected. Shepard dies in the first five minutes of the game. Dead as a doornail. As the Normandy is savaged by a mysterious alien warship, humanity's first Spectre agent is sucked into the void and seemingly lost. Things look pretty grim.
The next things you see are computer displays of lab-grown internal organs, robotic arms bolting cybernetic doohickeys onto bone structures, a desperate scientific effort to resurrect a man who was nothing but "meat and tubes" when they brought him in.
That's right: Commander Shepard is Robocop. He was dead, and they brought him back. They made him better.
That was the biggest surprise to me about the setup in Mass Effect 2. Not that Shepard is some sort of bizarre cyborg zombie--which is evident by the fissures in his face through which you can see the faint glow of machinery. That part is a little creepy to me, but the people involved in the project like the scientist Miranda and the biotic soldier Jacob assure you early on that you're as much Commander Shepard as you ever were (other than the cybernetic bones and all that). For all I know, the resurrection story was just an excuse to let you completely remake your appearance and class (which you can) when you import your save from the first game. The surprise for me was that Shepard is working for Cerberus, a largely reviled organization he finds personally repugnant but that, at least for the moment, seems to share his goals. No more Spectre, no more Citadel. Shepard's original team is scattered to the four corners of the galaxy. The Normandy is lost. After the relatively upbeat ending of the first game, this isn't where you expected the big hero to end up.
For a little visual reference, here's Shepard and Jacob, escaping from the Lazarus facility as it comes under attack by unknown forces.
Game-changing setup or not, though, it's not long before you start to settle back into Mass Effect's old rhythms. Jacob and Miranda respectively make for biotic and engineering squadmates that are every bit as effective as their counterparts from the last game. The Illusive Man refuses to give you orders, but he does provide guidance, guiding you to a deserted human colony called Freedom's Progress, the latest settlement to be stripped of its inhabitants but otherwise remain seemingly undamaged. It's during your investigation that you run into Tali, the first familiar face from the first Mass Effect you'll encounter. She doesn't join up with you immediately, but there's some great tension (and the chance to gain renegade or paragon points) between Miranda's drive to find out what happened at all costs, and Tali's desire to protect her own people.
Hey, let's look at some of that!
Once you return from the Freedom's Progress mission, the game goes about as Mass Effect as it can get: You get a new ship. And it happens to look an awful lot like the Normandy. And the Seth Green-voiced Joker shows up to pilot it, and hey, he's walking on his previously useless legs! It's like a big old happy family reunion. This is the point where BioWare wrested the controller from my hands, but i can tell you before they did that Shepard's new ship has an advisor artificial intelligence called EDI (read: Edie), and the "Uncharted Worlds" music you hear while you're navigating the galactic map is almost exactly the same. Man, I loved that track.
You might also have spared the life of all-star Krogan badass Wrex in the last game, and BioWare let me see a non-interactive presentation indicating one example of how the game will differ depending on who's dead and who's alive. At some point, you'll travel to the Krogan homeworld, and if Wrex is dead, you'll understandably meet with an icy reception. But if he's alive, you'll find that he's united all the Krogan clans under the banner of Clan Urdnot to combat the genophage and strengthen the Krogan race. That Wrex... what a guy. Shepard.
At this point, Mass Effect 2 is looking like a better version of Mass Effect with a way more mysterious story and a steadier frame rate. All the touches I loved before, from the '70s sci-fi synth soundtrack to the film-grain visual filter, are still in place. I think I'm warming up to this new crew of misfits Shepard has gotten involved with, and the Illusive Man/Cerberus/resurrected Shepard storyline is such a curveball that I really can't wait to find out where it goes. I hope no one at BioWare takes it the wrong way when I say I'd rather not see anymore of Mass Effect 2 until I can sit down with a final copy and play through it for real.
