Overall: Absolutely not as good as Innocence. Visually striking but lacking significantly in gameplay and emotional appeal.
This game is significantly less compelling than the first. The linearity of the first game has been exchanged with more open level designs, allowing you to take your own path to the goal. This doesn't work, however, paired with idiotic enemy AI and ridiculous lines-of-sight, and plenty of times ends up with the player completing the section without actually using any stealth.
The "souvenir" system feels incredibly unrewarding and actually somewhat annoying when, paired with the open level design, I simply want to progress the area to get to the next piece of story and, not knowing which path truly leads forward, I end up taking a long-winded side path or puzzle with an obtuse solution just to be rewarded with a soulless bit of dialogue and a vector art thumbnail of a cutscene.
While the environments, modelling and voice acting are all superb (minor gripe: I wish everybody didn't sound so blatantly british in the sequel), and the game is visually very striking, that's about where it ends as far as recommendability. The dialogue is completely oblivion-esque; characters don't feel like they're talking to each other as human beings, they're just spitting platitudinal one-liners more for the benefit of the audience than the person they're talking to, making most interactions feel compeltely stilted and robotic. The dynamics and relationships between the characters are completely forced, and there's no real substance behind any given person's motivation to assist the protagonists, aside from Mom and Lucas (who were in the first game).
The story is bloated and repetitive, and as the characters' motivations to help each other are unclear, so too are their courses of action through the world. The scope of the story expands and so too does its complexity; the significance of all of the major complexity in the first game having to do with the "thresholds" or stages of Hugo's ascension could have been expounded upon, but instead the writers (or editors) opted for a storyline filled with new characters of no import and goals of no significance. I don't care about [spoiler]Arnaud[/spoiler], I don't care about [spoiler]Sophia[/spoiler], and I CERTAINLY don't gaf about the latter enough to play a whole third game about her that seemingly has nothing to do with anything that made the first game so good.
The ultimate goal of [spoiler] getting to the island for the sake of a cure [/spoiler] returns absolutely nothing, and while it could be argued that this futility is the very catalyst that drives [spoiler] Amicia to finally kill Hugo, as she arguably should have done or allowed in the first place [/spoiler], this doesn't detract from the fact that this is a deeply unsatisfying method of elucidating that point. This could have been done gradually, through meaningful interactions, rather than a whole weird side quest [spoiler] on a cult island with weirdo leaders and a rat nest ground zero that tells us literally nothing about our characters or the world they live in, aside from some very heavy-handed environmental cues (like the giant rat's nest cave)[/spoiler]. Also, the entire segment where [spoiler] Amicia is searching for Aelia and echoing her thoughts and feelings as the dynastic protector feels completely unconvincing and made up on the spot. The fact that all of the skeletons of the killed soldiers and Aelia's final resting place lines up feels convenient, not earned[/spoiler].
Overall, this game felt much less focused than PTI, and it suffered a *lot* as a result. maybe buy it on sale, if you're REALLY into these games, but honestly if you want to save your money and have just as much fulfillment and closure for the end of the story after Innocence: >>> [spoiler] Amicia kills Hugo in the end, submitting to the fact that he will always be an existential threat while alive[/spoiler].
