I'm a bit disappointed with it. I'm glad the missions were free.
Yeah, pretty much what I was thinking as well after finishing the last mission yesterday.
I was hoping for it to be like the Mako in ME1, only, you know...
better. But it feels more like a Jump'n'Run.
Also, after replaying ME1 last week, I think one of my biggest gripes with ME2 are the sidequests. There just aren't enough of them, and they don't really seem to have much of a connection to the rest of the game. Sure, the planetary exploration in ME1 was tedious, and the sidequests were repetitive. But at least each one had a neat little plot, which sometimes even span multiple missions (like the Admiral Kahoku -> missing Marines -> Cerberus subplot).
The prime contrasting example to that in ME2 is the mission where you land on some planetary platform and have to turn a shield generator back on... and that's it
It just feels completely irrelevant to the rest of the game.
And even if the item system in ME1 was again a bit tedious (a dozen versions of each gun with 10 levels each, tons of upgrades etc.), I still regret how much it's been toned down in ME2.