ME2 is greatly overhyped. It's good game for a shooter-rpg hybrid but as a rpg it's only average.
First the main story starts interestingly but the ending is some kind of sick joke.
Second the plot missions feel like they are a bunch of random side stories thrown together - go to planet x recruit dude y go to planet z do mission to get y loyalty.
Romance is some kind of poor joke - long gone are the days of long important talks with Bastille now you get a chick or guy you want with little effort and 100% certainity. But woohoo they added sex scene so all the angry teenagers are happy :)
There's only two/three kinds of weapons in each class of gun and usually the new ones are so much more powerfull that you ignore existance of old ones for the rest of game, but hey weapons got it lucky anyway unlike armor which feels completly pointless and you could just as well don't wear it at all (oh and if you wear full armor prepare to watch you helmet all the time in all cutscenes since real hero never takes his helmet off once he takes the armor)
Character development feels like it was only added to fullfill checklist requirments of rpg genre because you will get all the skills you want anyway quite soon (not like they add much to the game anyway - i finished as vanguard with minimal power usage). Oh and just in case to save you from thinking Bioware removed most of non-combat stuff so you won't be ever "Wasting" you precious skill points on skills needed to open locks and hack.
Then we have space exploration and mineral harvesting - because as we all know commanders on secret missions have tons of time to go sightseeing while his crew scans the planet surface and that's before cold logic kicks in and asks ourself if every idiot with ship, free time and few probes can harvest minerals why the hell there's anything left on a planets in systems that have been inhabitted for hundreds of years. And then you start to wonder how exactly the research guy can build experimental ship upgrades and weapons on a small lab from few basic minerals (why do they exactly have shipyards and weapon producing corporations at all in this universe I wonder)
And then there's the game play- there's only one or two missions not requiring you to kill everything you encounter in a narrow pathways leading you perfectly linearly to the final semi-boss. And by linear i mean something which would make even FF XIII creators proud :D Also yes they removed elevators and loading from ME1 - you would think wow genius programmers - wrong they simply made maps extremly small and to kept gameplay long by adding long corridors. But going back to non combat quests they are extremly weak - just compare the wallet quest on citadel with kotor 1 quest where you had to decide which of two guys is lying as part of jedi training.
Honestly speaking after Kotor 1 and Jade Empire Bioware had a status buy day one whatever they release for me and while ME1 mantained it i must say DA and ME2 disapointed me to the point where i will wait to price drop for DA2 and ME3 (after like 8 months from release those games now cost 1/4th of release price in Poland)
PROUD MEMBER OF THE PSP RPG FAN CLUB
