Re: Mass effect 2
Short answer, yes, especially if you liked ME1. I keep meaning to type up a reviewish post, now that I've finished it, but meh, busy plus lazy. Here's the short version:
The story, despite a couple bits not making sense if you think about them too much, is suitably epic, and the individual storylines for each character are, with a couple of exceptions, very well written. The voice acting is well done (especially if you play as FemShep), and they did a good job making your interaction with NPCs more interesting than two talking heads facing each other. It's a pretty typical Bioware "first act on rails, second act wide open, third act on rails" structure. The second act, where you do the recruitment and loyalty mission for each member of your team, and delve into their backstories, is the strongest bit. Also, if you import a ME1 character, there are callbacks galore, where you meet NPCs from the first game who will refer to your actions in ME1.
The gameplay is basically ME1, only streamlined. The cover based shooter bits are emphasized over the RPG elements, so if you enjoyed having twelve million character advancement options, you probably won't like that. I was irritated at first, but after playing though it, I think the game benefits from the streamlining. A lot of the depth of ME1's character system was illusory, I think, and boiling it down to the essentials works well. Instead of, what, like 20, levels of very minor increases for your skills, each skill has four levels, each of which is significantly more powerful than the last. Each class has one skill that is unique to it, better differentiating them from each other (my Vanguard, for example, has a move where she launches herself across the map into a distant enemy like a biotic cannonball). Inventory management (probably ME1's weakest aspect) is gone in favor of a system where you research upgrades for your weapons. Tooling around in the Mako is gone in favor of a tedious mini-game where you scan planets from orbit (although they're apparently adding a new Mako-type vehicle via DLC at some point). The heat dissipation system is gone in favor of an ammo-in-all-but-name system, which adds nothign to gameplay and makes no sense in-universe. With no loot to find, the environments tend to have less branching paths to search for goodies, and are more linear runs from start to end.
Overall, I give it 9 out of 10. If not for a couple of quibbles (tedious planet scanning, weird quasi-ammo system, linear space dungeons) I'd have given it a 10.
Oh, and bump the difficulty to at least Veteran. The game is ridiculously easy even for my uncoordinated ass.
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