Taste is subjective, but as someone who have played: Baldur's Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn, Mass Effect, Neverwinter Nights, MDK2, Shattered Steel, Jade Empire, Mass Effect 2, Mass Effect 3, Dragon Age: Origins, Command & Conquer: Generals 2, Anthem on their release dates, I'd rank them in that order. So to me Mass Effect 2 wasn't one of their best games, but it was also not one of their worst.
Mass Effect 2 is the primary reason I've only played Mass Effect 3 once, because I just can't get myself to go through 2 again despite having replayed Mass Effect 1 several times. I don't think it's a terrible game, on the technical side it improved so many things, but I just don't like the story. To be fair, Dragon Age and Anthem were the only ones that really dissapointed me.
I wouldn't personally go that far; having recently replayed all three back-to-back, I'd say that they're just very different types of games.
ME1 is a an excellent story-driven action RPG with clunky combat and issues with environment size/complexity due to technological limitations of the platform it was built for.
ME2 is a very good story-driven third-person shooter with excellent combat and a thin veneer of RPG elements that has overcome a lot of the technical issues with ME1 despite the same platform/engine.
ME1 by far has the better story and I enjoyed it more than ME2 on my first playthrough years ago, but now, already knowing the story, ME2 was more fun to play this time. It's a shame they couldn't have improved on everything good about the first one instead of turning it into a shooter.
Personally, I'd love to see the whole trilogy reimagined and remade as a single giant open-world action RPG, but that's probably never happening.
To this day, I would love to have a trilogy of games that were like the first one. Alas that Bioware basically immediately abandoned the direction of the first game for a much worse one in a misguided attempt to try to appeal to the mass market.
You're right. The sense of wonder and exploration I got playing ME1 was just totally absent in ME2. But it was nonetheless a pretty good game in its own right, and for many people, a game they enjoyed more than the original.
I loved ME1 and was disappointed by ME2 because I loved ME1 so much. I devoured the lore, every codex entry, and even the long elevator rides where you had to listen to news reports about your earlier actions. The world-building was so much better, and all of this was reduced to a minimum in ME2.
ME1 was an epic space RPG with action elements, while ME2 was an action game built around a collection of crew side stories with lighter RPG elements.
ME2 was not particularly good. The characters were good, but the gameplay was severely dumbed down and the main story was flat out bad. I don't know who at Bioware thought it was a good idea to force the player to work for Cerberus (basically space Nazis, for anyone who hasn't played Mass Effect), but it wasn't a good idea. You can't just railroad the player into working for bad guys in a game that is supposed to celebrate player choice. Not only that but they mishandled the villains, and the entire Collector plot was a waste of time that didn't contribute to the overall story. ME2 was the beginning of the decline in Bioware's quality and it never stopped after.
