This is just a dull sequel, it refines things to a modern polish like much better level design and the mechanics they incorporate into them, as well as the gunplay and stealth mechanics, but past that everything is just a downgrade.
The grind is a total chore due to being full of challenges that take eons to grind through, bug out all the time, and can't be sorted properly, while at the same time needing to grind to unlock skills, and to level up your weapons to have attachments that make some of them even usable due to the awful iron sights.
Past the iron sights issue, the attachments barely do anything as it was a heavy handed copy paste from modern Call of Duty games with minimal thought of how badly that could be put into a game like this, and the skills are boring and unimpactful, you can only pick so few but even then due to badly planned out systems the meta is clear and obvious.
The armor system is atrocious, a straight downgrade from the perfected systems from the previous 2 games, there's nothing wrong with a system of a short rechargable bit of health, and then a much MUCH larger permanent pool below that, instead you just get effectively 2 different health bars, with your health being less valuable than your armor for some reason? and there's never a reason to not run heavier armor and armor bags for all of your teammates, apparently there are some advantages other than extra downs (which are useless because of how useless your health is) but you are NOT told this AT ALL.
It also makes additions like trading hostages for med-kits completely useless, because you should never EVER be relying on your health unless you're spending them just so you can conserve your armor bags for later.
Past that there's the stealth changes, most of them were actually pretty good BUT, the removal of detection was a huge mistake, stealth players are still restarting on every failure, but now when playing loud there's no reason to try and psuedo-stealth by not setting off the alarm until you've done like half of the objectives already, because ALL of your resources minus your ammo are a PERMANENT loss.
Not that it matters all that much, with the hardest difficulty being a total cakewalk once you've gotten a skill and weapon loadout that gets you one shot headshots for most of the level.
The special enemies are also a bit of a joke, Tasers are really unlikely to shock you a lot of the time and have a gigantic weak point on their thigh on-top of the fact that they were already easy kills, Cloakers are now useless, reviving you instantly when they're killed, and chew through your health instead of your armor, which even if it was a risk takes so long you'd have to be trying to mess up for it to impact your run, Naders are actually decently well designed at the very least, due to the fact they chew through your health so fast that getting stuck in the gas for a few seconds will down you even at full, and Bulldozers just generally have AI/Map design issues where they're 9/10 of the time going to go down without a fight, but that 1/10 of the time they're bulldozing the entire team because the first heist is in a gigantic wide open area, Shields are alright, I guess.
Overkill weapons are just not in a good state, the helicopter drop needs to be removed as most levels are not designed around making your weapon accessible, and it's not strong enough to the point where risking so much just to get the weapon for a short period of time as the ammo lasts is worth it, the Grenade Launcher is absolutely garbage on anything other than the perfect map for it, due to the insane splash damage on it and the fact that it's only impact explosions on hit, and the sniper is just, well, a sniper, you're killing single targets, It works well at killing specials I guess, not that that's a hard thing to do, and it's bugged against bulldozers where it only 2 shots them to the torso.
And then to follow all of this up with a MTX store to come soon, as well as DLCs to come, with the only update 40 days after launch being a bug fix patch with no balance changes, and Overkill (or Starbreeze Studios as they're known now, I guess) responding to poorly received features with "we're feeling pretty positive with the systems so far"
It looks like it's going to be another sour year for the series, and probably will take quite some time to recover, as it usually does.
The grind is a total chore due to being full of challenges that take eons to grind through, bug out all the time, and can't be sorted properly, while at the same time needing to grind to unlock skills, and to level up your weapons to have attachments that make some of them even usable due to the awful iron sights.
Past the iron sights issue, the attachments barely do anything as it was a heavy handed copy paste from modern Call of Duty games with minimal thought of how badly that could be put into a game like this, and the skills are boring and unimpactful, you can only pick so few but even then due to badly planned out systems the meta is clear and obvious.
The armor system is atrocious, a straight downgrade from the perfected systems from the previous 2 games, there's nothing wrong with a system of a short rechargable bit of health, and then a much MUCH larger permanent pool below that, instead you just get effectively 2 different health bars, with your health being less valuable than your armor for some reason? and there's never a reason to not run heavier armor and armor bags for all of your teammates, apparently there are some advantages other than extra downs (which are useless because of how useless your health is) but you are NOT told this AT ALL.
It also makes additions like trading hostages for med-kits completely useless, because you should never EVER be relying on your health unless you're spending them just so you can conserve your armor bags for later.
Past that there's the stealth changes, most of them were actually pretty good BUT, the removal of detection was a huge mistake, stealth players are still restarting on every failure, but now when playing loud there's no reason to try and psuedo-stealth by not setting off the alarm until you've done like half of the objectives already, because ALL of your resources minus your ammo are a PERMANENT loss.
Not that it matters all that much, with the hardest difficulty being a total cakewalk once you've gotten a skill and weapon loadout that gets you one shot headshots for most of the level.
The special enemies are also a bit of a joke, Tasers are really unlikely to shock you a lot of the time and have a gigantic weak point on their thigh on-top of the fact that they were already easy kills, Cloakers are now useless, reviving you instantly when they're killed, and chew through your health instead of your armor, which even if it was a risk takes so long you'd have to be trying to mess up for it to impact your run, Naders are actually decently well designed at the very least, due to the fact they chew through your health so fast that getting stuck in the gas for a few seconds will down you even at full, and Bulldozers just generally have AI/Map design issues where they're 9/10 of the time going to go down without a fight, but that 1/10 of the time they're bulldozing the entire team because the first heist is in a gigantic wide open area, Shields are alright, I guess.
Overkill weapons are just not in a good state, the helicopter drop needs to be removed as most levels are not designed around making your weapon accessible, and it's not strong enough to the point where risking so much just to get the weapon for a short period of time as the ammo lasts is worth it, the Grenade Launcher is absolutely garbage on anything other than the perfect map for it, due to the insane splash damage on it and the fact that it's only impact explosions on hit, and the sniper is just, well, a sniper, you're killing single targets, It works well at killing specials I guess, not that that's a hard thing to do, and it's bugged against bulldozers where it only 2 shots them to the torso.
And then to follow all of this up with a MTX store to come soon, as well as DLCs to come, with the only update 40 days after launch being a bug fix patch with no balance changes, and Overkill (or Starbreeze Studios as they're known now, I guess) responding to poorly received features with "we're feeling pretty positive with the systems so far"
It looks like it's going to be another sour year for the series, and probably will take quite some time to recover, as it usually does.