Here's the one liner: 'It was great.'
For those of you who like actual information, continue reading.
The voice acting is fantastic, the graphics are pristine, the storytelling is good, it's very stable...
Everything from the first mass effect which interfered with having fun is either gone or vastly improved.
There's no more converting vast amounts of equipment into omni-gel, there's no defeating a horde of enemies only to find out that you have insufficient electronics skill to get the loot, and that awful circular puzzle mini-game is gone
replaced by much more interesting and logical hacking and bypassing mini-games.
The performance is absurdly good; even on high settings on my second-rate machine, it ran seamlessly at excellent framerates.
The engine is very stable; in fact, I encountered only one bug during my entire first playthrough: my player model ceased to rotate, which didn't really interfere with anything but sprinting. However, after passing through the next set of doors, it returned to normal, indicating a a partial engine restart, without a hitch in the framerate.
My only complaint is story-related: The default story is that you chose ALL the major renegade story options in the first game, which is basically the opposite of what I did, making me wish I had kept my savegames. Oh well.
In conclusion, it improved in nearly every way on the first mass effect, which is saying a lot.
