[Adam]

I'm about two hours into Mass Effect 2. My first impression is that the story is top notch, but I preferred the gameplay in the first one. It may just be a matter of my needing to get used to it, though. One design decision I simply do not understand is the change to how weapons work.

For those who didn't play the first game, your pistols, shotguns, assault rifles, etc. do not use ammunition. The in universe explanation is that each weapon contains a block of extremely dense metal suspended in a mass effect field, and it shaves slugs off of that as needed, giving each weapon unlimited ammunition for all practical purposes. You couldn't just go crazy spraying bullets everywhere, though, because your weapon was limited by heat. You had a heat meter for each weapon, and you could see it increase as you fired and decrease over time if you stopped shooting. If it ever hit the maximum, your weapon would overheat and could not be fired again until the meter was completely empty. I thought it was a very elegant design that forced you to fire in controlled bursts while eliminating the need to play inventory manager with an ammo supply.

In the second game, ammo is back, although it's not called ammo. Your weapon does not overheat in ME2 because heat is dissipated by "thermal clips", which are ammo in all but name. You pick one up, it has 10 uses, you fire 10 shots, those uses are gone. In universe, they are supposedly an improvement over the old system, but i can't see why any designer in his right mind would take an infinitely usable tool and re-engineer it to be dependent on a limited resource. It would have been cool if the thermal clip were a resource that you could expend in critical situations to extend the length of time you could fire a gun without overheating, but sneaking ammo in through the back door is inelegant and irritating.