Mass Effect 2 Collectors' Edition: Prima Official Game Guide

I ve played a few hours and when I looked back to this guide, I found this guide is ok but lacks depth in many ways.

I had the original Mass Effect 1 guide in hand, overall their styles are similar but I can guarantee that this guide is written in such a hurry, and far from being comprehensive about a massive game, so let me compare them to show you what this ME2 guide lacks.

Minuses:
- ME1 guide has way more tips and notes than this guide, these tips and notes are like: where to find extra items, how to open extra dialogue, the strategy of fighting enemies etc. This makes ME2 guide less new player friendly.
- ME1 guide always uses an extra little section to talk about morality choices for some important dialogues, what is the benefit of being Paragon or Renegade. Well, ME2 guide has no such thing.
- No mission summary(what you ll get in this mission, including codex, weapons, armors, etc) like the ME1 guide.
- There are many little nice touches from ME1 guide which are missing from the ME2 guide.

Pluses:
Well I guess I was being a little negative above. This guide does show its worth, especially with the Amazon's $16 pricetag.
+ The 3D Art section by the end of this book.
+ Hardcover collector's feel
+ a nice poster
+ decent walkthrough of missions

Close comments:
Overall I would rate this one 3 out of 5. If you would like to complete your collection of ME2 stuffs, then buy this guide. If you are looking for a comprehensive reference of Mass Effect 2, well go somewhere else. In my humble opinion, the Fallout 3 GOTY guide is still the best out there among all other guides, if you own Fallout 3 guide and expect to get something alike, you will be disappointed. I will update my review later if I found some other important things I would like to share with you

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 typically only get guides for RPGs, aside from how much this game has been turned into a shooter rather than an RPG, well this guide was little more than lacking in all departments.

-No breakdown of bonuses/perks for importing from Mass Effect 1
-No breakdown of actual items/weapons/armor statistics
-Missing items found in game
-Missing sidequest(s) information in game

etc

If you absolutely need a guide, get the standard guide, save some money.

Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R2IO513N94JATG This 320 page hardcover guide for Mass Effect 2 is full colour with an excellent hardcover of N7 logo featured on Shepard's environment suit -- droplets of water stand out as they are printed glossy on an otherwise matte cover.

After having reviewed the Assassin's Creed 2 Collector's Edition: Prima Official Game Guide, this guide was kind of disappointing by comparison. For one thing, the quality of the paper used for the book to be pretty soft and flimsy, like those in mass produced magazines, definitely not of a collectors' edition.

Inside, you find the usual walkthrough, list of weapons, armour, skillsets, mineral locations etc. The spoiler-free walkthrough is pretty mundane and nothing to write home about, and appears to have been written in a hurry right before the deadline.

As with the other recent BioWare game, Dragon Age: Origins, the Mass Effect 2 universe allows a high level of interactivity, where your actions and decisions affect the outcome of the game in a profound way; the guide does remind you at crucial points of the walkthrough, but that's about all it does with no detail elaborations. Even the strategies for completing the stages are pretty skeletal.

The presentation of the guide is pretty simple too, just a list of the missions, and short descriptions of each mission which is nothing you would not find in the game itself, readers might find the guide pretty wordy although there are plenty of screenshots.

The roughly 25 pages of concept art at the end of the book looks like it was included as an afterthought. Quite a lot of the pieces look like screenshots from the game itself, some would appear quite familiar as Mass Effect 2 Collector's Edition which includes a (small) art book too. Even the included wall poster disappoints.

If you are looking for a high quality guide book to complete your experience of Mass Effect 2, you might be disappointed with this guide. You might consider getting this if you want to complete your collection of the game's collectibles, but if you do not have the cash to spare, just settle for the normal paperback edition, there is nothing you would miss.

(More pictures are available on my blog. Just visit my Amazon profile for the link.)

The 1st guide for ME1 was pretty comprehensive and useful. This one..not so much. You dont really need a guide for this game. Everything is pretty easy to find. The only thing you'd probably wanna look up are all the extra missions and where to snag the rich minerals on scanning planets. If you admire art work- this has some. Ive even spotted some minor mistakes. Overall, not really useful.