I thought the plot of the first game was actually pretty good - it was just told in a really bad way. The dialog was pretty bad and all of the karma moments were just dumb.
I'm interested in the new one, though. The first game was actually lots of fun and I loved running around the city. The mission editor should be cool, because I actually found myself wishing I had more to do after the game was over. It didn't really take too much to clear out all of the districts and find the dead drops, and collecting blast shards got kind boring.