Death (Spoilers)

Death has three components in Mass Effect 2. There is death at the beginning where you get your ass spaced. There is death during gameplay where you just get to reload at the most recent savepoint. Lastly, there is death during the final mission ... said death is permanent and carries into Mass Effect 3 though how I do not know.

The death at the beginning leads with your character spending two years getting himself rebuilt by Cerebus. Though the first death is heroic and cool since you save your pilot when your ship gets attacked and you end up getting spaced.

Death during actual gameplay is interesting in that it's like most modern games where you can just reload but gameplay can be so very very hard at higher levels that you simply die in minutes. Without the reload there would be no way to complete the game.

Your teammates can also die but you get a special power called unity which allows you to revive them in midcombat at the cost of 1 unit of a not so rare item. Or at least at the highest level of the ability it only costs 1 unit. Still it changes how you play - especially at higher difficulties since it is sometimes better to send a teammate in to die, draw the enemy out, revive the teammate and have them flank the badguy. It's saved me more than once especially on the smaller, denser levels.

The final part of death is the one that scares me the most personally. You can literally kill off a character you've spent two games developing. Your character has certain relationships, armour you;ve found, weapons ... you have an attachement with your character only for him to be torn from you at the end. I have no idea how it will work in Mass Effect 3 if you have a save where your main character died, but it will be interesting.