I am not a fan of pure shooters. For me, the major downside is how much the rpg elements have been watered down. The change in gameplay styles from the first one has made every class feel like shoot first then if you have time use powers. I definitely like the first one more at this point.

Yeah, thanks for removing planetary exploration from the series. What were they thinking? The search for minerals is pretty painful imo. But meh! Really? Not your cuppa? To each his own.

I am more happy with this game every hour I put in. Big, beautiful and the best characters I've ever seen. The conversation system and voice-acting is second to none. Samara is just amazing. This knocks F3 out of first all-time for me, but of course I've never played Planescape Torment, OOT or Mario and Luigi WTFE on the SNES. Sorry!

The difficulty seems to be ramped up as even on veteran I'm getting, flanked, surprised and taken out quite a bit. Load times seem long. The red fingers of death creep in to obscure your vision just when you need it most. I hated the Mechassault games and I don't enjoy being knocked out of cover and killed before my PC is allowed to react. Great game overall though.
It makes ME1 look pretty tame.

While I agree that mining for minerals is pretty boring, many side planets in ME1 were terrible. There were usually 3 points of interest, all of which were just copy and pasted over and over from side planet to side planet. Doing away with those was an extremely good idea.

It would have been even better if they had replaced it with something that was actually fun though. Not that it matters all that much, it just would have been even better.

Ameratsu. We disagree on that then. All exploration needed was some variety in landscape and buidings and some kind of boost or jet to get the mako over the mountains. Removing it from a game based in space feels limiting and less like the free-roaming wrpgs I prefer. JMO

The problem becomes trying to render the world at the faster pace maybe? I had to laugh at some of the complaints about 1 though. They seemed to expect the galaxy in minute detail on a dvd 9. For $50!

I'm all for exploration but once you had explored one poorly done side planet, you had basically explored  them all. Scaling jagged peaks is fine, but what you scaled those peaks to reach was wholly underwhelming as many side planets were virtually identical. I agree that the mining minigame isn't very fun either, but the side missions (anomalies) in ME2 are MUCH better than ME1. Absolutely no contest.

I guess collecting Turian emblems and recovering stuff from broken satellites over and over again is your idea of a good time, huh?

another reason why ME2 is better than ME1..........

@dahuman, that weapon is epic. I only used it once though :( It's not like there are tons of heavy weapons ammo lying around all over the place.

I used that to take out 2 of those mechs one time, gonna try to do that to a heli on my second play on insanity heheheheheh....hahahahaha.....muwahahahahahaha!

I killed a collector uber-enemy (can't think of the name) in one shot with that.

Also took down 60% of the Thresher Maw's life with it, hehe.