Honestly, I like mass effect. I do. I love some of the characters. And occasionally I like to see it when Shepard shows some humanity and vulnerability like in ME1 when the council grounds him or in ME2′s dlc when Liara asks him how he really feels. I like the universe, the themes, and the interactions between the various characters. But other than that, shepard is hardly human and hardly shows any personality beyond the choices you give him. The plot is pretty generic. The battle system is hardly revolutionary or complex. And your choices have ZERO real impact on anything that occurs in the story. It’s a good game. But not worth half it’s hype.

No, Mass Effect has not changed gaming forever. If it has, I quit games. Mass Effect 1 was a largely average game filled to the brim with potential. Saren never really felt like a threat, he didn’t feel dangerous, he didn’t make you fear him, he didn’t make you WANT to kill him, he made very few appearances in the game and one of them was his death. Horrible antagonist.

The story itself was highly cliche and fairly average.
The exploration was fairly pointless. I’m sure you don’t need me to explain why, anyone who has played the game knows that.
The combat was bang on average, it wasn’t great, but it didn’t make me want to chew my thumbs off.
The lore was Grade A, BioWare has always done an incredibly good job on their lore.
Moral choices are all well and good, but that’s been done before and if you need me to name games that have done it before that blow Mass Effect away, I direct you to Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 which are both extraordinary games and should recieve a lot more credit than they do. Though I can understand why you may disdain the combat system.
The environments were pretty though they needed to be larger, the voice acting was pretty great, and the individual stories of your crew and “random” people you met were all forgetable but all of its faults were okay, because it had potential.

Then came along the steaming heap of average that is Mass Effect 2.
They stripped out all the parts of Mass Effect 1 that gave it its potential, instead of focusing more on those areas.
The combat is not intense, it is not hard, it is not strategic or tactical, it is “Run in to the room, take cover, shoot until the enemy is dead, repeat.” The biggest choice you make is if you should even bother shooting or if you should let the retarded A.I. shoot at the boxes you’re hiding behind while your team mates gun them down unchecked. I do not see why it is recieving so much praise purely on the combat alone. It shouldn’t.

The antagonist… what antagonist? There is no bad guy, there’s no specific bad guy to hunt down, which I’m fine with, it’s actually a fairly fresh step to take but the way they done it was horrible. You encounter The Collectors 3 times during the game if I recall correctly, once they take out the Normandy, which was a cool scene, but you don’t have any control over that. Once to kick their ass off of a colony and once to wipe out the large majority of their race. They don’t really seem very threatening, BioWare really has to work on making you want to destroy the enemy, rather than them just being there.

The exploration… oh wait, none of that either.
The story was under-average.
The environments were still pretty but suffered the same problem, they need to be larger.
The individual characters that you meet, while improved, still weren’t great. Aside from a special few.

Essentially Mass Effect 2 took the Mass Effect formula, ripped out all of the potential and didn’t improve drastically on anything, yet it’s recieving critical acclaim it just does not deserve.