How to Lose at Mass Effect 2

Just to see what happens when “the worst possible scenario” is imported into Mass Effect 3, the folks at GameInformer have went through Mass Effect 2’s “suicide mission” and intentionally botched it as much as possible without actually losing Commander Shepard at its conclusion. I’ll let them explain it:

Using the flow chart BioWare helped us assemble after the release of Mass Effect 2, I decided that I wanted to try for an abysmal Suicide Mission…but one that could still be imported into Mass Effect 3. In other words, I didn’t want Shepard to die, but I wanted as many other people to die as possible.

For this run of the game, I imported my worst ME1 character an engineer who romanced Kaidan. She started as a joke; I hated Kaidan so much that I wanted to punish him with a pug-ugly Shepard as a love interest. As I played, though, I used her as an opportunity to see how the game responds when you do everything “wrong,” so that made her perfect for the botched suicide run.

It’s a non-stop series of questionable command decisions. Send Garrus into the vents? Leave Mordin alone to hold the line? Sure! I only got two characters’ loyalty, because you need squad members alive at the end for Shepard to survive.

The end result is a 29-minute gameplay video that actually serves as pretty good comedy.