Talking of separation from the first game... although you would be hard pressed to tell from, say, a screenshot, aspects of both the live playing segments of the game and the RP backbone are significantly different (only the social interactions and story choices are unchanged). Small changes to firefights make a big difference- a button is now used to activate cover, and using one power causes all of them to have to recharge, preventing you spamming each in turn and forcing you to choose which one you want to use. Fair enough- though a few times I died because what looked like could be cover turned out not to be, and sometimes its cover logic prevented me being able to fire at people some two feet away from me who were killing me. I'll forgive it that- just- because I think they improved the AI; I certainly had fewer issues with my team. Some changes take a while to get used to- the basic 'interact' command was changed from 'e' to the spacebar. 'e' becomes an order for one of your team to move to the area you are looking at, which you will do a heck of a lot for a while if you come from the first game (on the PC, in any case).
Two differences to the fighting dominate though- the regenerating health and the addition of ammo. The first game had a healing skill that affected your use of first aid to patch yourself up. Now, you automatically recover health if you spend enough time not being hit; no skill involved. This is part of a great exercise of stat stripping the game indulged in; more below. The ammo system is a big change- the first game had an overheat system; fire too much and your gun became unavailable. Now, you have ammo; fire too much and you cannot fire any more. They call them 'thermal clips' in a frankly hilarious attempt to maintain continuity with the previous overheat system; this attempt fails. They say they did it to give the tension of an ammo system. This also failed; the ammo system is a an illogical waste and a downgrade from the original- the max you can carry is absurdly small, especially for pistols, but enemies drop so much that it is all effectively irrelevant. Is the final effect better or worse than the original? Well, the power cooldown system is sensible, as is the way that special effects often now arc into place rather than just auto-zapping a foe, thus actually introducing a little player skill into the action game as you have to be just a little clever to get some of these effects to hit someone behind cover. All in all, though...I think they put in rather a lot of effort here to not much effect. I don't think they really improved the game. Still, all of this twins with this stripping issue...
I mentioned before how the inventory and armour/weapon system in the original was a pain (and I didn't even mention the even further detail involved in adding mods to your weapons and armour). Either this was a common complaint or there was a great philosophical shift in Bioware during development, because they certainly addressed that issue... by removing it. You have, literally, NO inventory in Mass Effect 2- they make a big thing of it, even at one point issuing a speech called 'Where has my inventory gone?” That's not all that went. No upgrades, no weapons, no armour (well... kinda; you can choose from a small pool of armour types for Shephard whilst on board ship), no social or non-combat skills (no charm, intimidate, medicine, hacking skills... all gone- your ability to Charm or Intimidate is now tied directly to your Paragon or Renegade score), no weapon skills (if you can use the weapon at all, you are as skilled with it as you can be), grenades have become skills rather than... grenades, and even all the funky special skills have been hugely curtailed.. There has been an almost ravenous stripping of the RP elements of the game. You now have fewer skills to use, and far fewer choices in how to set yourself up. You upgrade your weapons by researching and finding blueprints for better stuff around the game world; this gives you some trivial choices in what weapons to take for the team on the way out, but it is all barely worth it. Is this some glorious new streamlined future for RP games? Or is it dumbing down for the console crowd? Well, there was me complaining about the absurd complexity of the first game but... I didn't like this. They took something that was overburdened and replaced it with something that's just boring. There needs to be a better way, although there is something to be said with having fewer skills to worry about.
This has a bearing on the 'RP vs shooter game' argument. Technically speaking, all I said above about this being primarily an RP still holds true... just that now you can affect far fewer of the variables. You have far, far fewer choices about the weapon in your hand and NO choice at all about your skill with the weapon, so I guess the balance towards it being player skill in combat is very different. Yet I cannot call it a shooter. It's not MEANT to be that. It's still MEANT to be the RP, and all the mechanics behind it are meant to be that... I just suspect they didn't appreciate quite how much of that they crippled. A shame. This is all part of a wider question of just what people want from the pure gameplay of an RP game these days, and in many respects Mass Effect is the polar opposite of Dragon Age. Bioware have tired, and that;s fair, but I think they missed their target.
And it is not as if I have so much faith in Bioware as to not believe they could make such an error, as some of their other decisions are incomprehensibly bad. They scrapped vehicle sections after negative feedback from the first (replacing it with something they said was better in one of the DLC packs- they are incorrect about that...) and completely redid exploration. Now, you must physically drive your ship between planets in a system, and also between systems in a cluster of systems, burning up fuel on the way, on the top down map. In the original, you could just click on your target and be there; now you have to click and wait for your ship to fly there, burning fuel if between systems. You have to burn up probes now to scan planets, and use a kind of spectroscopic system to find either side missions or valuable material for researching there, instead of exploring the planets on the ground as before.
Again, fair play for trying something new. But where the action changes are questionable these are not, in that these changes are unquestionably shit. Burning up fuel and firing off probes has, literally, NO PURPOSE. You never actually have insufficient fuel to go somewhere and nor is running low on probes actually a fatal issue. So the only effect of this system at all is to force you to fly back to the central system to burn trivial cash on refuelling and reprobing. So not only is it now slow and tedious to fly anywhere, we have a completely pointless mechanic that adds no choices or drama or gameplay or... anything at all, that makes it even MORE tedious by forcing you to fly, slowly, back and forth to restock. Jesus. As for the spectroscopic planet searching- it's interesting the first time you do it. It's already boring the second. There are over a hundred worlds out there. You get the picture. Ok, it is somewhat less time consuming than the exploration grind of the original... but somehow they actually managed to make it all MORE boring. That's actually rather talented, in a horrible, horrible way.