Customer Reviews

Mass Effect 2: Prima Official Game Guide (Prima Official Game Guides)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

The guide covers the basic basics and captures none of the soul or mythology of the game. Do this. Go there. It does make sure to give nothing away, but does not go into any of the role playing aspects, team dynamics, character creation strategies, battle strategies, companion info, romantic possibilities, conversation choices. All of them are mentioned, but only just. The guide doesn't offer anything the gamer couldn't get on their own, no insight, no great photos, no soul.

I've used guides for other games (the Final Fantasy series in particular) to be sure that I've completed all of the side quests, know which weapons have better stats and where to find them, etc., and I wish I had paid attention to the reviews of this guide before I purchased it. I read them while it was in transit, but figured it was only $14 so no harm done if it wasn't quite up to snuff. It's significantly below par.

Between talking to your crew between missions, your yeoman giving you a heads up to keep you from forgetting a loyalty quest, the linear nature of the missions and the blue highlighting on the screen when you point the reticule anywhere near a wall safe or other searchable object, you really don't need the walkthrough.

Areas where a walkthrough would be helpful would include better combat tips for difficult fights, including pros and cons of various heavy weapon choices going into a section. However, there is remarkably little along these lines that is useful.

The writer also makes no effort to consolidate upgrade information in a useful way. They tell you what the upgrades do, but not where each of the five damage upgrades for a weapon can be purchased or found. This would have been really useful information if you wanted to focus on getting all of the upgrades for a particular weapon type first, or find all of the damage reduction upgrades as early as possible.

The planet information is displayed in such a horrible table, I would only consider using it to locate planets with Element Zero resources, since as long as you mine the other planets as you need resources, you can generally keep up with research.

All in all, I would *highly* recommend waiting until something gets put together on GameFAQs or other online resource, as it's bound to be much more useful to you. As someone else noted, the maps can be handy... but again, the missions are so linear it's difficult to miss anything unless you're breezing through. The one exception to being easy to find that I've found was the pistol upgrade in the assassin loyalty mission - for which there is no map and the reference is buried in otherwise useless text.

Spend your money elsewhere.

I have the collectors edition of this book, which includes some fancy stuff (that really isn't so fancy.) I'm only going to comment on the actual GAME GUIDE material here, which is identical from one version to the next.

This book is a GAME GUIDE for a video game. So when I get to a portion of the game and I'm hesitant on which choice to make and I refer to my GAME GUIDE for some insight on what ramifications these choices might have.... ...and the guide tells you COMPLETELY DIFFERENT CHOICES than what actually exists in the game... ...then it's automatically a useless product.

The choices on my screen consisted of three different guns to choose. I could only have one, so I was hoping to learn which was the best for my style of gameplay. This Game Guide told me that I could choose between three versions of UPGRADES for my existing weapons, and proceeded to tell me how those tech benefits might affect one particular class (out of 6) for my character. Oh I scanned back and forth to see if I was missing the right section, but nope - the game guide was flat-out wrong.

This is simply unacceptable. If the "official game guide" doesn't have the right information about the "official game" then it's nothing more than a pretty paper weight.

In the end, I use it for the maps, since there are NO maps in the game (idiots.) And since you only get one chance to explore most of these areas, I try to make sure I didn't miss an upgrade or a new weapon, etc. I am quite hesitant to trust it though, at this point.

**UPDATE**

During the last fight, which I apologize for having to spoil here a bit, I encountered an event where one of my team members dies. I don't want him to die, because then I don't get the achievement for keeping everyone alive. After two repeats of this section (thanks to a clever game save spot) I yield the same results. So I turn to the GAME GUIDE! Oh Game Guide of wisdom, tell me what to do! The Game Guide says, "Note: It is possible that one of your team mates may be killed at this point in the game." NO, REALLY?! I HADN'T NOTICED! What advice does the heavenly game guide provide to circumvent this problem? NONE! NOTHING! I have to go online and hit some chat boards to learn that you have to choose a teammate with a history of leadership for this particular section in order to keep him/her alive. OH! Well that makes perfect sense. Why couldn't the OFFICIAL GAME GUIDE have told me this? Ah, the world will never know.

DON'T BUY THIS STUPID BOOK!

Most of Prima's guide to Mass Effect 2 is devoted to a walk-through, which would make sense if it were a guide for a linear game. However, the best quality of Mass Effect 2 is the huge amount of freedom the player has to explore and enjoy a beautifully detailed universe. This guide should have been more like a tourists guidebook; with maps showing locations of encounters and loot, star charts showing where missions and resources can be found, and warnings about what you may encounter along the way. Instead it is more like a narrative, for the most part just repeating what is happening on the screen, with some advice on what to do at each juncture.

Good: The description of the squad mates gives good advice on how to use each one effectively.
Bad: The missions walk-throughs do not tell you what you will be up against at the beginning (which is when you choose your team), so this information is not as useful as it could be.

Good: Charts containing information and advice for use on gear that can be acquired during the game.
Bad: The charts do not list where the gear can be found. You have to read the whole book to find out where you forgot to pick up that cool Tempest Submachine Gun.

Good: A planetary database listing all of the planets in the game.
Bad: The database is a complete waste of paper. It is just each planets descriptive text from the game cut and pasted into a box. The planets are sorted by name, but until you visit the planet in game, the name is not given. That's right, the only way to find out which planet the guide is talking about is to travel to the planet in the game - at which point you already have the information in the guide. The database does not even list which missions can be found on the planet. This should have been the most useful part of the book, instead it was completely pointless.

Good: Maps for most of missions showing locations of things the player may otherwise miss.
Bad: No maps for the side missions.

Good: Descriptions of all of the available missions in the game.
Bad: Where are they? The planets are given by name, which, as explained above, the player does not know until they travel to the planet. Also, it would have been nice to have small hints up front ("take squad mates effective against synthetic enemies") so that the player can be prepared without having to read the details and spoil the story.

Bad: The walkthroughts. Really. Some information given is given too late to do any good, like describing in the middle of a mission something the player had to do before the mission started. Some information is just flat wrong.

I am so happy that I restrained myself from even opening this book until after my first play through. Now I wish I had not wasted my money. It is not so much a guide as a list of spoilers. Instead of helping someone get the most out of a wonderful game, it just takes the fun out.

Okay what it does right:

Maps of major levels.
Discussion of different missions.
Nice art additions in the hardback copy.

What it does wrong:

No maps of minor missions.
No breakdown of what achievements give you.
Poor organization.
In general, this is a crap book.
Despite great presentation not enough additional value in hardback edition.

It does not want to give away general mystery of game and thats fine but this should be a comprehensive walk through. I do not feel that the writer played the game enough to really give it the detail it deserved. Yes a good strategy guide can spoil the game but it is there to help you plan. The first ME strategy guide was phenomenal for one reason, it had comprehensive maps of all the worlds. This cut down significantly on "exploration time" to find every single element out there. My suggestion to all strategy guide writers is that unless your guide has comprehensive level maps then you have not done enough work on the guide.

I usually buy strategy guides for RPGs. So, this review in many ways is in comparison to other quality guides such as that for Fallout 3, Dragon Age Origins and Oblivion.

First, this guide gives away the first scenes of the game in the first few paragraphs of the intro. That is absolutely unacceptable to me. Usually it is safe to read the first few chapters of an RPG guide that deal with character creation, classes and leveling. That was not the case with this one. I was so concerned about spoilers after that, so I didn't even use the guide until my second playthrough.

As mentioned in another review... this guide only devotes a few weak pages to character creation and the other members of your squad. This guide is mainly a narrative of what happens in the game, there is very little offered in the way of strategy.

Don't waste your money on this guide, just use one of the guides online.

This is a pretty good guide book. The only thing I didnt like about it is on the last mission it doesnt really tell you who to pick. it just basically says if you pick the wrong person then they have a chance of being killed. Which I knew, that was why I wanted the guide. Not very helpful in that part of the game but the rest of the book is pretty solid. And I did enjoy the maps. But if your thought about buying it mainly for the last mission. Don't, you can probably find it online and this guide doesnt help there anyways.

Wow glad to see Prima is hard at work falsifying the quality of this rag. Firstly if people don't know better, the star system is usually about the product. NOT how quickly it got to your house. Nor that a book *gasp* was still in good shape while being fed ex-ed. Also this is a review about the strategy guide, NOT THE GAME. Maybe EA has its employees trolling on this too. Look at the reviews that have the highest usefulness. I bought this with my preorder because it was fairly cheap. I did not know it wasn't just cheap in price. It does nothing for character creation that you can't read on screen or in the instruction manual.

There was a time when games came with instruction manuals that told you stuff! And the strategy guide was very gritty explaining a lot of deper stuff like game mechanics, best selections for success and challenge, and charts with numbers to show how things worked. One of the best was for Master of Orion. The game manual was 45 pages thick on 8,10 landscape oriented paper(thereabouts). And the strategy guide was phenomenal. This guide told me the exact thing I could already read on screen. No number bonus for what a given weapon might do, no skill bonus quantifier. Just "Yeah this will make you better at that" Wow genius deduction there sherlock. How about skill X is worth +Y for Z level and +yy for ZZ level. Nope no such luck. Play the game to find out...umm I don't have vast swaths of time like some of the people who game.

As mentioned by others there is ONE useful thing in the guide. Which planets have element zero. However you could have found that out also by playing the game. This just tells you what system has it to save you some time searching. YOu still have the challenge of scanning and probing the stuff.

Hoping Mass Effect 3 is better than part 2 which was a bitter let down from game to guide from the original "XBOX EXCLUSIVE" The foul hand of EA got hold of this adventure RPG and tried to turn it into COD, or Gears. If I want to play a shooter i will. They do it better anyways. Thankfully the people at BIOWARE make great stories for their games, something that the original ME clearly beat this installment on. Too much change instead of just part 2 of the story. I never felt like my character advanced through the whole game. Couldn't customize much of anything. Meh all the way around. As a game mass effect 2 is a good game, but it doesn't hold up well against part 1. Sorry to talk so much about the game end, but like good books this sequel just doesn't live up to the incredible universe created in part 1.

The guide provides you all the background you need to help you understand the game and more efficiently complete levels and find planets with missions. However, Mass Effect 2 is more of a shooter game then an RPG, so the missions are relatively straight forward, with little room to choose different ways to complete tasks. Based on this, if you are on the fence on whether to buy the guide, I think you could easily get through the game without it and not really miss much. The only thinks you would really miss is information on the affects of your paragon/renegade decisions, but this could probably be found online without buying this guide.

This is not a guide, it is a walkthrough ... and not even a good one. There are so many details missing (I do not want to include spoilers) that you wonder if you even need it at all. It just seems like a rush job done without much thought into what a guide should be. Most of the (miniscule) non-walkthrough information is cut and paste from the game menus itself (that contains way more information than this guide). The only thing it was good for was to find which planets were worth scanning for resources, and where the N7 missions are (which would have been of no use, if the game did a better job of not forcing you to do the boring scans on the planets to find out where they are). The game levels are linear enough that it is hard to miss any weapon upgrades - if you think you might miss them if you didn't have a guide.