Huh, I was thinking of making a thread like this in the shower today. Glad someone beat me to the punch. I've played about 10 hours so far, so here goes:
Gameplay - combat:
I like it a lot except for the fact that they redid all the key bindings and I had to reset them all to my likings. The lack of crouch isn't that big a deal because you are almost always either behind cover or dead, you simply don't loiter around in the open. In ME1, I used pause a lot to line up shots, in this one the shooting is much much much more fluid and natural which is a huge plus. On the downside, the heat clips (ammo) dealio is a huge turn-off for me much as I expected, mostly because now you have something extra to worry about that just doesn't add anything to the game. So far, shotguns have also become extremely underpowered (well, they were overpowered in ME1) because of less accuracy and limited ammo.
Gameplay - Exploration
Ok, I haven't done a whole lot of this, just scanned a few planets and jumped a few systems. Getting rid of the Mako is nice, the drop ship mechanic works well (i.e. there is none), and planet scanning works out just fine for me (as do most of the new mini-games, although they've been easy so far). Hearing Tricia Helfer say "Probe away" gives me a a hardon anyways, so, yeah.... Ahem, where was I? Right, the navigating around systems thing is annoying because of the fuel requirement which seems unnecessary and doesn't add to the experience.
Gameplay - Loot and XP
Huge revolution going on here and I'm mostly loving it. No more lists of useless guns and armour to comb through, no more heaps of useless add-ons that just got finicky. I'm not a big loot person, so I see the steps Bioware is taking with this RPG to be a huge step forwards, but other people might not appreciate it as much. It basically ties in with the new combat, allowing you to focus on the fighting and less on the item scrounging. The XP system has also been changed so that you get most of it through quests, not killing enemies. It doesn't really affect the game so much, and seems like a relatively minor change.
Presentation - Graphics etc
Wow, I was worried this game might not run on my laptop, but amazingly it runs even better and looks a lot prettier than ME1. With the first game, it often felt as if I was running through molasses and I had to use pause+aim to line up shots on fast moving targets. Huge thanks to Bioware for optimizing this one a lot better. The art design is solid, and its always nice to see some of the little things from ME1 make a return, like the crates, wallsafes, power junctions, and other misc bits of room furniture. The voice acting has been good so far, but Bioware still hasn't figured out lip synching - its a continuous project but they don't seem to be making much progress. The other downside is longer loading screens, but since the trade-off seems to be less loading within levels, I can live with it.
Story and Characters
So I saw someone mention in the other thread that the title of "Illusive Man" is setting new lows in infantile drama, even compared to the "Shadow Broker" (who is still in the game). Well, yes, but then again I just think of him as Martin Sheen, so no difficulty there. Miranda has so far proven to be interesting, Garrus has more of a personality and an interesting rapport with Shepherd, and the Salarian scientist is pretty hilarious if jarring at first. Jacob has kind of fallen flat on me, and I just picked up Jack. Too early to rule on the story overall though, we'll see.
Overall
ME2 is a very different game from ME1 and I like that although its taking a while to get used to. There is more of an emphasis on missions and once-through areas that disappear once you finish the mission (plague area on Omega and Purgatory so far for me), so it sort of feels like an amalgamation of open-world universe, local static exploration areas, and once-through levels taken straight from the shooter genre (I once played Gears of War on a friend's PC for a bit and it was quite similar, except with more grunting.
I'ld give it an 8.5 for now, but if the story gets epic it could easily jump to a 9.0. Expectations not met, but they gave me something equally excellent instead. This ain't ME1, and I'm fine with that.
