Must I say that I adored the first Mass Effect game!
It was very much entertaining, unique in its own way, action-packed and both the story and the characters are very well developed. I'm not a big fan of science-fiction in general but this franchise made me reconsider some of my choices and probably in a near future I'll try to play other videogames within this genre.
Mass Effect 2 was a really good sequel and I enjoyed it a lot. A more darker tone was present throughout the whole thing that made the story itself more compelling and addictive and also managed to shape the characters somehow along the way.
A new set of squadmates was present and we get to see some familiar faces such as Tali and Garrus. And each one of them had their own storyline (or sidequest, if you want to call it that) that explored more of their backgrounds and if you succeded, their loyalty towards you would increase. And I can honestly say that character development was one of the best components in ME2.
There was an obvious improvement in graphic quality, which I appreciated. In terms of gameplay, not so much. There were still a couple things that I liked but at the same time, it felt like there was almost nothing that I could pinpoint that felt trully good in this specific component.
The weapons were basically the same with just slight differences between each other and only a few newer ones were added that really helped defeating the enemies. There was also a new component in ME2 which was the "Planet Scanning" and even that felt a little bit disappointing. Yes, in order to have more upgrades to either the Normandy itself or the character's power, we'd have to scan a lot of planets searching for resources that allowed to make the said upgrades. I guess it was okay, I never really cared about that... and it could be distracting at times.
But the thing that bothered the most was the map. Whenever I wanted to check the map and see where I had to go, I always had to click on a specific button and a few seconds later, the map itself would disappear. This made me repeat the same process a lot of times and that, in comparison to ME1, was really difficult to deal with.
Overall, it was a very enjoyable videogame that had its ups and downs with a really good storyline.