It's weird to see so much praise for ME2 everywhere. I hated the game after ME1. There's basically no main plot. 90% of it is side quests to flesh out side characters. Which, fine, I see why people enjoyed so much, but it felt so pointless to me because the main plot boils down to "throw all these people at a final base and see who makes it out alive". I wanted to see the ME story moved forward, but it took until ME3 before that actually happened.
Also, ME2 committed character assassination of Liara, who, for some reason, unexplainably turned from a nerdy aecheologist into a deadly spy assassin. And the game railroaded the player into working for Cerberus. Ugh.
'lets build this McGuffin thing that we conveniently found at our doorstep at the very right moment and which we aren't even sure how it would work, but we will use resources of the whole galaxy to build it' story was hardly any better.