While there were examples of BioWare's trademark branching conversation system, most of the game was all about doing some Gears of War-style cover shooting to get to the headquarters. Shepard had to deal with armed aliens, nasty robots and even some rocket positions at the end. Obviously the full version of the game will have characters deal with special abilities and skills that need to be improved but none of that was really needed in our PAX 2009 demo; we just used our standard rifle, covered and poked our heads out to shoot, and soon pretty much every enemy was down for the count.

It's truly impossible to get a feel about how Mass Effect 2 will really be like based on this demo. If this were a typical third person shooter we would be encouraged but there was none of the deep RPG gameplay than we expect to see in the final product. However it is BioWare we are talking about here so we aren't worried too much about them not delivering on their promise of a better sequel. Mass Effect 2 is still due for release in the first quarter of 2010.