Such as the 'insanity' difficulty level of Mass Effect. The only problem is, the Insanity mode is locked away, requiring two playthroughs to unlock. Naturally, this upset some people, who would.

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Mass Effect 2 If you follow a few simple steps, you will find that Insanity will not drive you insane in Mass Effect 2.

I actually started to write a guide for gamefaqs on how to play ME2 on Insanity, though like many of my spare time projects its currently in haitus. While its not formatted well enough for public consumption, if you want me to email you a copy for private use I will.However, the basic points are as follows:. play as a soldier, its the most straightforward class. stay in cover, except when fighting husks.

buy all the upgrades as you can afford them, which does mean tedious planet scanning. don’t panic if its to hard at first, it does get easier.Mass Effect 1, I don’t think I ever even tried to play on Insanity, or if I did, it was a long time ago.Edit: Alternatively, check out this guy’s videos on playing Mass Effect 2 on Insanity. The link below is for his guide to the Soldier class. Tom, I played through ME and ME2 on insanity, and my response is going to be predicated on how ME3 handles higher difficulties. My shoot-from-the-hip answer is to wait and take a character you’ve already beaten the game with through again, since in ME1 both your level and loot would make the jump with you, and that made insanity much easier. They changed that in ME2 though - your level carried forward, but not your loot.

So starting at high level meant your enemies were also high level, but you didn’t have all the great powerups, so you really were making life more difficulty by using the “new game plus” option. So if ME3 uses that option, then I guess you should, uh, just jump in guns blazing. That’s what I’m going to do anyway. olliDon’t leave cover, you will die in 3 seconds out of cover no matter what defensive powers you think you have.

This is a cover shooter (the combat is at least), play it like one./liliAccept that you will die when you get surprised and stuck out of cover. The damage is so high on insanity that it will happen even if you’ve played through the game before and know what to expect./liliDon’t get greedy. If your shields go down, get your ass behind cover again. Some very few times you dont have a choice and it is do or die, but rarely are those few extra shots worth getting killed for./li/ol. Tom Chick:So I know some of you die-hard Mass Effect fans have powered through the games on the hardest difficulty level. What advice would you have for an erstwhile Mass Effect tourist who wants to flex the game’s combat model by playing though on “insane”?-TomI’ve played entire ME1 on insane difficulty, starting with fresh (lvl1) character. To be able to do it you just need to hack settings file, changing few bytes.

You can easily google it if you are interested.The experience was challenging, but not insane/masochistic, at least with a Soldier main char and his assault rifles. Personally I find it great - just the right balance of challenge & fun.

And it has made battles more deep and challenging, since now sometimes you had to utilize better and more complex tactics to win. I would recommend it if you are looking for challenging but fulfilling game.Just my two cents.

The main thing with Insanity is if your shields aren’t up you should be in cover preserving your health bar. There are rare exceptions to this rule but for the most part you’ll be spending a lot of time in cover waiting for shields to recharge. Unless medi-gel rains from the heavens in ME3, you can’t afford to use it every encounter and you’ll probably want some in reserve for boss fights.The second thing is figuring out which squadmates abilities complements yours. As an Adept, I typically bring a soldier type with the ammo augment that shreds whatever type of shielding we’ll see on the given mission, and then a second biotic type who will help me set up singularity - warp combos. Careful consideration in forming your squad can make the difference between a mission being hard and a mission being nigh impossible, especially early on when you don’t have many ability points to spread around.And it probably goes without saying but disable the squad power usage and disable auto level up.

You should be using the appropriate squad skills on cooldown as the situation dictates, and you’ll have a much better idea where points should be assigned than the game (or at least you should!) From what I can tell, the auto level up system sprays skill points around in a haphazard fashion which is not very helpful on Insanity. Intitially you’ll want to put the bulk of your points in one skill with a point here or there in other abilities for utility as needed/desired.Other than that, only pull the trigger if you’re going to hit an enemy and have fun. I think you’ll find that Insanity converts ME’s combat system from something that can be played as a somewhat standard shooter to a more RPG-like rock/paper/scissors system.

You’re going to die, quite possibly a lot, but you should always know why you died and what you can do better next time.edit: oops, misread this as advice for ME3. I don’t think I ever played ME1 on Insanity, so I can’t really speak to that. I tried, and failed, to get through ME1 on Insanity with a fresh character.

Got through Eden Prime all right, but the first fight on the Citadel, against two assassins was impossible for me, because Kaidan and Ashley just dropped dead after a bit of enemy fire, the assassins kept regenerating health and shields, and Shepard didn’t have enough crowd control options to stop them from firing.I only found out later that I could have avoided the fight.With that in mind, I would say. On the Citadel, recruit Wrex before searching for Garrus. (Avoids the above fight, and Wrex is a bit sturdier as a companion.). Of the main missions, postpone rescuing Liara for a while. The last fight on that planet is an immense difficulty spike; I would avoid that until you are at least at level 20. Start at Feros, then go to Noveria.

Mass Effect 2 Suicide Mission

Playing as an Adept turns even Insanity into a cakewalk once you’ve upgraded Singularity, Lift and Barrier. So don’t do that, unless you want to enjoy the spectacle of enemies flying through the air while your companions tear them apart with gunfire.ME2 didn’t really click with me, so I never tried that on Insanity. Red guy:. Playing as an Adept turns even Insanity into a cakewalk once you’ve upgraded Singularity, Lift and Barrier.

So don’t do that, unless you want to enjoy the spectacle of enemies flying through the air while your companions tear them apart with gunfire.In ME2 it’s the opposite, pretty much every enemy has shields, armor or barriers. Warp does pitiful damage compared to skills like Incinerate and all the disables are useless until you strip the enemies of shields. When you run out of medgel and your Overload/Disruptor ammo NPCs drop playing an Adept gets really hard.IMO the strongest class is the Infiltrator.

Overload against shields, Incinerate against armor, Tactical Cloak to relocate without taking damage and to kill most enemies in 1-2 shots. Zombo77:IMO the strongest class is the Infiltrator. Overload against shields, Incinerate against armor, Tactical Cloak to relocate without taking damage and to kill most enemies in 1-2 shots.Infiltrator doesn’t get overload, unless you are talking about taking it as a bonus power. And while overload works against shields, it does nothing against barrier, which is used by the Collectors. I think warp works against barriers, so you have to choose under your scheme.

Frosty mod manager instructions. What I think works best is respeccing your Shepherd against anticipated opponents - overload against mechs. Other races, warp against collectors for barriers. Adept in ME2 was significantly easier than anything else I’ve played (though I haven’t tried a full soldier playthrough yet because yawn). Bring Zaeed. along for squad disrupter ammo, Miranda for overload/warp and pick up the assault rifle option in that one Collector mission. You now shred shields in seconds and can either CC 2-3 people at once or burn them down one at a time, depending on whether you went for wide singularity/unstable warp or the single target variants.I’ve only found a few difficulty spikes for Adepts: the triple mech side mission you get from Omega, any mission that reduces your squad count to 1 or 2, and the final boss. I’m told you can cheese all of those with a certain heavy weapon but I’ve never had it along with me to try it out.

swap to Grunt for Collector missions for squad incendiary ammo. Thanks for all the comments. Keep 'em coming.Also, just to specify, I’m looking for general tips for an, uh, as-yet-to-be-released game more than specifics about ME1 or ME2 run-throughs. That said, Insanity isn’t actually all that insane when you import a character with so many points to spend before the first mission even starts!

I never played either of the first games in Insane, but it seems to me that it comes down to simply playing the game as it’s designed (i.e. Use cover, be patient, pick appropriate squad mates, set up combos, develop specific skills, etc.). One thing i’ve noticed in me3 is that normal weapons fire seems to have a (small) chance to hit you even behind cover now. Obviously i can’t be 100% sure, but i am almost certain that they weren’t at an angle to hit me behind cover if it was in the previous games.It doesn’t seem enough to really change gameplay radically, but it will encourage people to duck behind cover even earlier because you can’t count on not being hit and having your regeneration interrupted even when you are “safe” behind cover. Really, that this seems to be bioware’s intent by this mechanic change, making regeneration behind cover a little less certain.