Mass Effect 2 amps up the action and speeds things up; but not always in a good way.
I'll start off blunt; Mass Effect is my favorite game on the Xbox 360, and in my top 10 games of all time. While the game was far from perfect, it offered some of the most engaging stories and varied gameplay of any action RPG.
The sequel is, all-in-all, a triumph. The action is phenomenal, the story is solid, and the characters are fantastic. There are a few nagging issues, however, that bugged me personally.
First, I'll do a bit more indepth view of the good.
The action. Incredible fun. It's such a huge step-up from the previous game, to where you will be actively looking for combat scenarios due to the diverse and challenging battles. With the inclusion of "hot key" type abilities, where a push of a button will activate a skill for you, there is a lot less time spent seperated from combat. Ammo types finally have a purpose, and often have entertaining results. Biotics and tech powers are also far cooler to watch and use this time around.
The story: While most of the game (about 90%) is spent recruiting, the story is still an engaging one. The cast of characters is very diverse, and there wasn't a single character I didn't thoroughly enjoy. With as many characters as there are, Mass Effect 2 does a good job of branching out each and every one of them.
The little things: The fact that your large crew talk to one another and have little personal backstories, the fact that you have to gain the loyalt of your squad members (although, some of this is bad. See below.), little touches to your armor (which, happily, will always have the bad ass N7 logo now), the fact that you can decide what your casual gear looks like. Mass Effect 2 does an amazing job of putting little touches on things.
It's funny: No really, there are some pretty funny moments in this game. It does a really good job of supplying comedic relief, particularly in the form of a certain fan from previous games
The graphics and sound are spot on, with little-to-no pop-in, and guns that sound diverse and really bad ass. The environments are far better this time around, with no cookie-cutter side-missions.
And now, for the bad. Keep in mind, none of these are really game ruining things, just little things that kind of irked me a bit.
Oh so streamlined: This game is very fast paced. Sometimes, too fast paced. The elevator scenes were definitely annoying at times in the original Mass Effect, but now there are just simple load screens. Also gone are the "decontamination" moments when boarding the normandy. In fact, you rarely exit the Normandy directly. Instead, you land and are instantly transported somewhere else. When you go back to the Normandy afterwards, the ship immediately takes off. While some might say this cuts out dull moments, I feel more like this was a time-saver for the game makers who didn't want to spend the time to create the ports and the environments surrounding them. The Citadel is where this is worst. the Presidium has been reduced to the human embassy...and that's it. You can look out at it from the balcony, but you cannot explore any of it at all. I personally would have enjoyed walking around and seeing some the sites from the original game, and how these places were affected by the Geth invasion.
Planet scanning: While originally one of the worst parts of the game, I eventually learned to be okay with it. Yes, it's very boring and slow, but you can speed it up with upgrades, which I heavily recommend that you do early. Also, if you're looking for a laugh, try searching for minerals on Uranus.
Galaxy Map: For some reason, they decide to add a little tiny ship that you pilot around the galaxy map. I found this to be really quite silly. The galaxy map is a set of plot points, likely allowing Shepard to designate coordinates. What is that little ship? Is Shepard sitting there with a little joystick piloting that around, making ship noises with his mouth? Dumb. Also, the inclusion of fuel is kind of annoying as well, but would be less annoying if you simply clicked where you wanted to go, and were informed whether or not you had sufficient fuel to go there.
On to my biggest pet peave: The new level system. It really seems like the levels in this game are just there for the heck of it. The complex skill tree of Mass Effect 1 is reduced to a set of 4-6 skills, each with only 4 tiers. This would be fine, as it got rather tedious wasting my one skill point to raise my Assault Rifle accuracy by 10%, but the way XP is gained is really quite bad. You don't get any XP for killing enemies. I went on a mission, gunned down dozens of husks, completed the mission and got 100 XP for it. One of the most rewarding points of RPGs is going the extra mile to get XP and level up, and that is completely removed from this game. This actually makes it rather linear. At the end of the game, your Soldier will likely be almost identical to mine as far as skills and levels go.
Weapon upgrades: This is a rather mixed decision for me. I found that the way weapons and armor were handled in this game made more sense. No longer will you have an asari scientist walking around in full combat armor with a full compliment of weapons she has zero training in. However, you end up upgrading things without much of a reward. It says your assault rifles now do 10% more damage, but without any kind of scale for how much damage it did before, the result feels rather hollow. I feel like this could have been fixed by giving some starting numbers for how strong it is, then see results as you upgrade. Another possibility is visible signs of upgrade.
Thermal Clips: Instead of overheating weapons, now there are ejectable thermal clips. This is space jargon for bullets. I had mixed reactions about this, but all-in-all, I'm okay with them, except the really unusual maximums you can carry for certain weapons. For instance, the starting shotgun has a maximum of 15 "clips". While the thermal clips are pretty easy to stumble upon, I found myself running out of shotgun rounds fairly often, and having to resort to using my pistol. I think they should have doubled that number, as it's not like the shotgun was too over powered or anything.
Really, Mass Effect 2 is kind of like a brand new BMW that has a dent in the hood. You're still really happy to have it, it looks and runs great, and you thoroughly enjoy it...but that dent will always bug you, if only a little bit.