Originally found here

Praise.

It's brilliant. Throughout the whole game, each story, recruitment, and loyalty mission was different. Even the randomly discovered side-quests and assignments, which used recycled environments and flat characters in ME1, all felt fresh and unique. A remarkable accomplishment, and one of the many signs that BW genuinely listened to and learned from the reactions of the players of the first game. ME2 is bigger, and better, in just about every possible way. The writing team deserve some kind of award, I've never been as entertained, for so long, by any other game, ever. I smiled, laughed, and nearly cried at several points. I was pumping my fists during the final mission. Sure it has its clangers, and occasionally the voice acting is sub-par, and every so often you notice some horrible clipping, or floating, or some other immersion-breaking 3D modelling blunder, but there is just so much greatness in the game, it would be petty to pick up on these rare occurrences. It's beautiful too, with superb surroundings and vibrant inhabitants. It may all be scripted, but Mass Effect 2 feels more alive than Oblivion, or Fallout 3, or any other game I've seen that attempts to simulate living worlds.

Remember the time before Bioshock came out? Remember the promises we were made, of the profound moral choices we'd have to make? Remember what a disappointment that was? ME2 lives up to those promises. One is forced to make some genuinely difficult decisions in ME2, decisions which would stump any normal person in real life. Mordin's loyalty quest I think is the best example of this. Having a planned trilogy has allowed a game (two now) where we won't learn of the outcomes of our actions, until years have passed. Much like things often are in real life, I find. There's no quick-saving and reloading just to see what would have happened had we decided not to help Liara, or to see what long-term outcome of our missions on Tuchanka. We'll just have to wait and see. Or play through the game multiple times, and keep multiple saves, I guess.

Now, criticism!

I appreciate the work BioWare have done in streamlining equipment and inventory, but it left very few customisation options. There seemed to be little point to the newer guns, which were for the most part existed only as "Upgrades the x". If they were superior weapons, then why let me choose an inferior one? Why not just roll them into the upgrade system? Maybe if they each had their own advantages and disadvantages, like a trade-off between fire rate and fire power, then the choice might make more sense. I'm just being picky though, as the combat was a vast improvement over the previous game's, and is comparable to other FPS games, but a little more choice would have been appreciated.