One of 2026’s Best-Rated Games Is Basically Mass Effect With Spies
ZA/UM’s Zero Parades: For Dead Spies is a highly rated espionage RPG whose crew-gathering story closely resembles Mass Effect 2. The comparison offers a glimpse of the spy-focused Mass Effect game teased in a leaked trailer, which was cancelled after EA shut down BioWare.
Released for Windows PC on 21 May, Zero Parades follows disgraced spy Cascade as she returns to Portofiro, the setting of her failure five years earlier, to recruit former allies for a likely suicide mission. The game centres on those recruits’ personal stories and their ties to broader problems in the city-state; one, Ramses, has been erased from official records and cannot obtain essential medication. Its structure builds much of the experience around assembling the crew and exploring their individual struggles, much as Mass Effect 2 did with loyalty missions.
In short
- Zero Parades follows a disgraced spy assembling a crew for a dangerous mission.
- Its structure and character stories recall Mass Effect 2.
- The cancelled Mass Effect: Universe trailer also pitched spies and espionage.