14 DAY TRIAL // Ever more increasing levels of difficulty are among the bones of modern gaming and, unfortunately, Mass Effect 2 is, too, guilty of inappropriate use of difficulty. Most of the players will never bother to change the Normal level they get saddled with by default and, by doing so, they will miss the true beauty and balance of the game's combat system.
It's easy to say it is just a streamlined cover-based squad shooter played from a third person perspective where the party members can be automated or directly controlled. But this is a real deep system which, unfortunately, is underused on Normal difficulty. Allies behave very well, death is infrequent as shields hold off quite a few shots, enemies rarely have both shields and armor to keep themselves out of harm's way and only a couple of bosses deploy their powers coherently and in a threatening manner.
But crank it up to Hardcore and the beauty of the combat comes together. You can really pop out of cover for just a few moments before shields and half of your health is gone, and enemies take quite a few shots before going down.
You need to combine biotic, engineer and battle powers from all the team members to take down shields, armor and then kill bigger enemies and, more importantly, you need to direct your buddies around with Q and E to keep them alive and useful in combat. There's also a need to take stock of the geography of the game space and take advantage of it to get through without liberal use of the heavy weapon you carry, when it comes to the boss fights.
And the stakes are even higher on Insanity, where I died once in the opening sequence when fighting the lowly robots in the resuscitation facility. I guess going through the entire game on Insanity (there's even an Achievement for that) can create an epic feeling in the gamer that really complements the suicidal mission feeling of the entire game.