was hoping this would click with me more upon a replay but i think it fell even further in my favor instead. at least i feel better about the original game again in hindsight.

the open world and whether it was a fit for the game or not has been beaten to death as a topic at this point but i genuinely still can't understand why they bothered.

what we ended up with is an empty and confusing to navigate (both because of runner vision seeing a downgrade but also in terms of just overall readability of the environments with the samey color schemes and constant glass) that strings off into more traditional linear story based missions. the issue is most of said story missions were either rushed, not the best quality wise, or both at the same time. the big climax of the game consists of waiting for some elevators you're on top of to rise, climbing some elevator shafts, some shitty combat, and a lot of hands off gadget use more or less. it's almost as bad, if not worse than the combat gauntlet that the first title ended with.

skill rolls are for some reason locked behind a skill tree (not far into it but again, Why?) in addition to countless combat abilities and gadgets that help with your parkour abilities as if anyone ever liked the combat or the movement system wasn't great as is. the level of feature creep is astounding and probably came at the cost of god knows what else.

it isn't like the game is broken or whatever but i struggle to think of a sequel from at least the past decade or so that has been this off the mark. very sad.