Not at all. The first one is a good RPG but suffers from some problems, among those are incredibly lazy side quest design that renders the whole "freedom to explore deep space" entirely useless, some incredibly poor texture work and animations here and there, some really bad voice acting in certain places and characters, severely annoying loading times and endless corridors to run down during missions, poor cover mechanics during shootouts etc.
The second one does the shooting better but everything else worse, there's nothing more boring than scanning a planet and then pressing a button to shoot a probe into the surface to harvest resources, it's the least interactive, sedate bullshit I've ever seen in any RPG. All weapons share ammo, no proper inventory, incredibly poor AI, powers are largely useless compared to simply shooting things dead, upgrades are too easily gained and the overall gameplay smacks of hand-holding and drone objectives.
To top it all off, the story is nothing revolutionary at all, mostly run of the mill sci-fi with run of the mill aliens with silly armors and scaled faces and tattoo's. The way it is told is decent, but the dialogue interface leaves little room for nuances, there's either good or bad, just like every other game that pretends to feature true morals.
All in all, still not having played the third game (I play on PC, mind you), the series is good but no where near fantastic, reviewers overlooked some pretty massive flaws and glaring design blunders in the two first ones. I'd rank Mass Effect and the first sequel well below games such Gothic or even Skyrim, they defeat themselves on some levels and Bioware are too caught up in "being mature" to produce truly compeling content lately and their new action-oriented style ruins the overall experience for me.
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