The follow up to the wildly popular Xbox 360 and PC game Mass Effect is set to hit the streets in January 26th in America and 29th 2010 in Europe. Mass Effect 2  is set two years after the conclusion of the original having stopped the Reaper invasion, Commander Shepard must join forces with Cerberus, recruiting some of the galaxy’s most dangerous operatives in a bid to find out what’s causing the miraculous vanishing of entire human colonies.

So what does the game handle like? Well it’s unsurprisingly more of the same so fans of the original should be happy. The textures and character models look a little more detailed and the cut scenes look great with highly detailed pre-rendered quicktime events in which you can chose what your character is going to say. What struck me about my time with the game was that the graphics looked really smooth, almost cartoonish in a way, but it might have been the setup they were using, only experience on a familiar system will be tell truthfully. The control scheme is similar to Gears of War with the cover system and firing very similar indeed. Most of the demo was spent sprinting from one piece of cover to another. Accuracy with the weapons in the game was also difficult to achieve, except the targeted rocket launcher that let you paint a target and then fire at them from any angle whilst the rocket was guided to it’s target.

Will Mass Effect 2 top the highly successful and critically acclaimed original, only time will tell, but from our limited hands on, fans of the series won’t be disappointed.

We apologise for not giving you any decent shots of the action but the EA reps were blocking photos and certainly weren’t happy when we tried to capture a few frames.

[Photo credits to Ben Smith]