Mass Effect 2 Collectors' Edition: Prima Official Game Guide

Comment: 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.

Comment: In a word - unhelpful. Useless also fits.
Mass Effect 2 is a HUGE game, and there are so many different decisions in the game to make that literally no single play through is the same. I bought this book because I thought it would help me play the game, I thought it would allow me to see the consequences of the choices I wanted to make before I made them. This is not the case. I thought that the book would tell me who the male and female Shepard could have relationships with, and how to make those flourish. This was not the case either. I thought it would tell me a lot of things that it just simply deliver on.

About 75% of the book is the "walkthrough", and about 90% of the walkthrough is the following - "to kill X, Y and Z people, use biotic powers and then finish them off with weapons." (I'm not kidding! It was amazing to see how many times they could reword that sentence) Which means that a huge percentage (I'm too lazy to do the actual math) of this book is just a waste of paper. The other 25% of the book is just general information about the game that you learn in the first few hours of gameplay anyway.

In short, I very much regret buying this strategy guide. Because it was neither Guide-e, nor Strategy-e. I don't recommend it.

Comment: The reason I didn't use it much is because I genuinely like the experience of searching around and finding things on my own. That having been said, I did reference it a dozen or so times to help find hidden planet missions...there are a lot of planets, and randomly searching all of them would have taken a loooong time. I also found the results of some decisions not how I wanted my character to develop, so I used the guide to show me which answer/choice was best for what I was going for...though that was only once or twice, as the moral choices are pretty obvious in most of the situations.

Comment: I am getting more and more disappointed with the quality of Prima's guides. This one feels rushed. It contains only a skeletal amount of information - none of which feels essential. The book looks nice and the extra content is welcome but the guide itself leaves me wanting a lot more.

Comment: 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.