I get it. I get why people love this. But to me, the combat and enemy design was mostly bad. But much worse is the incredibly poorly designed skill tree:
The game has 8 different branches of powers to level up, but if you level up anything other than your throw power this is a huge mistake and you will have a bad time playing this game. The melee power even fully upgraded does essentially no damage. It is just wasted points. Health upgrades also don't matter at all, because everything basically tickles you or one shots you. I didn't explore the shield powers or ground slam, but I would be shocked if those could hold a candle to the throw.

I would have liked the combat and therefore the entire game better if that skill tree wasn't so horribly balanced.

Not my style of game. Make a million decisions up front with no context about your character, go out and chat with people to gather quests, do the quests, gain generic loot which is identical to what you have, fight enemies in what is for the genre pretty excellent shooter combat, but compared to any actual shooter is ultra boring.

It is all fine. I see why people like it. To me, these types of games lack any sort of puzzling / strategy AND lack any sort of skill based gameplay. If I am going to play an RPG, I would much rather play something like Diablo with much much more interesting skill trees and loot. If I am going to play a shooter, I would much rather play an actual shooter with non-stop combat and interesting weapons or interesting tactics or interesting enemies.

It was good. Solid. Decent. I don't know! It was tedious. The puzzles were mostly convoluted "What order do you do this in?" type puzzles with occasional "Aha!" moments sprinkled in.

I guess it was a cool art style and some good mechanics but puzzle design was pretty mixed.

The ending I had some issues with the controls that dampened my opinions a bit, but it was still undeniably a cool ending.

Honestly, I expected more of the same. And yeah it is more of the same but it is much improved in every way.

The story is excellent and much more exciting (if not strictly better since the first one also has a very interesting philosophical story). The art and environments are way way prettier. And most importantly, the puzzles are much better and more consistently interesting. The first one's main problem is that it really dragged. Toward the end it had no new ideas and was just adding tedium rather than fun new puzzles. In this one, I never felt like a puzzle was tedious or repetitive or boring. I am somewhat shocked to be giving it the full 5 stars, but it was that good.