In comparison to the first one (which I played on PS4), it's really quite bad. The story is truly atrocious - the whole time I was waiting for a twist that never came. Offensively milquetoast on the characters as well - Mister Negative, Doc Oc, Etc. were really fun performance pieces from the first game, so to have such a played out, tropey pair of villains in this instalment was really crap. You don't even get to beat up the actually evil one.
Extremely light on content - this has been pointed out by others, but I feel it pertinent to mention that this extends to the player progression as well. There are far fewer suits and gadgets, but worse than that, they are extremely boring. In the first game, I wanted to wear all of the suits at least a little bit, and the cool factor of the designs made me want to earn them. In this game, every suit unlocks a passive ability, which is a neat idea, except for the fact that all but one have extremely small impacts on gameplay, except for one, which if you have any sense, you will equip as soon as you unlock and never take off.
The only thing left is the gameplay. In terms of swinging, I think I slightly prefer the original, but it might well be a placebo in terms of difference. The venom attacks are kinda cool, sometimes, but the main way the game gets you to use them, rather than by making them integrate well into combos, is by throwing an enemy type at you that is only vulnerable to one in particular, or by demanding that you get a crazy high combo, in which case the AOEs are necessary. The truly awful part of combat are the enemies that use AOE attacks that A) do not properly communicate the area affected in the wind-up animation and B) leave a lingering hitbox that still hurts you. Your dodge doesn't even avoid it automatically, so if you're busy paying attention to dodging other attacks, attacking yourself, or the 3 different meters the game puts on your hud, you get your combo reset and take chip damage.
I mostly was not having a good time.
