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Darker, grittier, possibly involving a severed hand and some wildly unpredictable revelation about someone's paternity somewhere along the way - that's what Mass Effect is all about.

"Yeah we have definitely designed it in that fashion," says Bioware co-founder Greg Zeschuk in an interview with IGN. "If you recall, Empire Strikes Back was the darker chapter and that is how we designed the ME2 story and experience: to try and make the player reflect on the challenges of the character. If you put ME2 next to the original it is definitely a darker, harder game."

Obviously, the universe at large is under some new threat of total (human) extinction, and it's up to hero protagonist Commander Shepard to win the day. The game apparently starts out with some sort of recruitment drive, as you'll be shipping around the galaxy hiring thugs. Introducing the new Krogan professional badass, Grunt.

"Grunt is good to fight alongside," says Zeschuk. "You would have seen the Krogan Rush where he just runs guys over - you could make Wrex do it in the first game but Grunt will do it spontaneously which is interesting. It is different than working with guys that have more traditional powers as Grunt has a much bigger chance of surprising you."

And all that fighting stuff has been totally revamped for this one. "Well combat was one of our big focuses. The original was the first time we had ever really tried a shooter, and just getting the game done was a lot of work. So as time has rolled on we've just got a lot better at doing the combat. The tradition of the RPG is a lot more like Dragon Age, whereas Mass Effect is more like a game with RPG features. I would consider it more of a Shooter RPG. Especially after the changes we have made in this one: it is even more like a shooter. It's very doable to make such a mix work; you just need to get practice with it." Oh, goody.

Then there's some new fishy aliens to meet (and probably kill somewhere along the way). These are the Drell, a race who - in that peculiar way that seems entirely limited to the context of RPGs - is apparently comprised entirely of assassins. Who fries the chips on that planet?

And improvements also abound elsewhere, as Greg goes on to elaborate. "We took three main steps to improving the engine. We put a lot of effort into both your team and the enemy's A.I. You'll see enemies do really smart things like running from cover to cover and mounting or even jumping over obstacles properly. But we really focused on your team mates too, to make sure they are pretty smart and their combat is really strong. In particular the way they use cover and their precision shooting. [Plus] we use a really smart reticule. So if you are actually focused on an enemy you have different options you can [order your squad to] do: you can bring up set commands on your hot buttons. If you point at the floor you can paint a 'go to' position on the ground, if you look at a power button they'll press the power button. We really just wanted to make sure that no one was doing anything dumb: like walking into a corner. We also made a lot of technical changes to improve performance. After Mass Effect 1 we had a really good idea of what levels worked well and worked fast but now we can do it with a frame rate which is rock solid. Now there are no slow-downs at all: that was one of our main goals from a technical standpoint. That and making sure that there was texture consistency throughout and it was all super slick: that was really important to us. [And] lighting: we actually worked a fair bit on the lighting as we wanted to refine it and to make it a lot more dramatic. It's almost a harsher lighting system, where the blacks are really black and there are a lot of hot spots which you'll see reflect off Shepard's armour. Those were our three big focuses." We also noticed during our hands-on a much greater depth and improved quality to the audio experience: this was not just related to the SFX, with seemingly longer conversation trees that evolve beyond the already stellar system in the original to deliver greater characterisation and even a bit of humour."