Definitely not an improvement on the first one. For the second game in the series, the developers decided to make a supposedly casual game MUCH more difficult and annoying. Some of the major changes I noticed... Zombies revive themselves all at once and continue stumbling around unless you hit them repeatedly. In the first game, some zombies were more difficult than others. The easier zombies would stop after one hit. Not in this game. They are all the same except for the mummy who you have to hit 5 times to get him to stop. When you try to put the zombies back at their stations, they don't often listen to where you want them to go. The other issue is that all zombies can and do revive each other. In the first game, it was only certain zombies that revived other zombies. In this one, they all revive each other so one revival quickly turns into 5. It's a pretty lazy way to make the game more difficult. It becomes nothing more than a click fest to knock zombies out so you can finish the level. Even when you do knock them out, they revive again less than 15 seconds later.
The other major change/issue is that zombie star levels don't increase regardless of how much attention you give them. In the first game, zombie revival stars increased for each station completed. In this game, the star levels don't change unless you upgrade each station 3 times. Upgrades of stations to delay zombie revival is very very expensive, which wouldn't matter much if the earlier levels were a bit less busy. Total cost is about $17k per station. This makes stations fairly useless until the second half of the game. So if you have a zombie that sits for more than a minute, he will be down to 1 star by the time you can get to him. The second you move him somewhere, he's already reviving.
Really hated the changes to the process of hiring butlers. Instead of being able to add a butler at any time, they now require you to find pieces of each butler in different levels. That means the game decides exactly when you can add a butler.
This game is MUCH busier much earlier than the first one. I had trouble getting through a level without at least 1 zombie reviving itself. In the first game, there were always ways to prevent that. There are power ups in this game to keep zombies asleep or knock all zombies out. Unfortunately, the power ups only work for about 5 seconds. It might even be less than that. I just finished a level in which the knock all zombies out sound effect was still playing when 3 more zombies revived themselves. Same goes for the keep zombies asleep power up. What good is a power up that doesn't work? Really disappointed because I loved the first game. This one is more annoying than fun.
