This game(a forced multirun progression game with grinding) is not nearly as good as the first(an adventure game with some minor puzzles). The combat and writing are pretty much the same, and I enjoyed it at first, then became annoyed with the gameplay loop, then frustrated with the randomness and design meant to waste the player's time.
This game has no puzzles, replacing them with fetch quests and grind. Want a new starting weapon? Pick up weapons dropped in a run(max two at a time), bring it back, and get a tiny bit of exp towards it. Want upgrades because you feel weak? Get money from a run, bring it back to maybe purchase one. Want to progress the story? Reach a certain point, get an item unlocked for sale, end the run to go back to base and see how much it costs, and go back into the level to grind if you don't have enough. Given a task to find something? It's either going to be a reward from another fetch quest, an item you need to leave your run to buy, grind enemies, or run for a minute elsewhere to progress it. Or, my absolute least favorite, it's in the tree that looks the same as the other trees except there's an easy to miss interact prompt on it.
This is not a rogue-like. The runs are the same layouts, the same enemies. The only thing randomized each run is the location of certain quest rooms, so first you have to get lucky enough for the elevator to spawn said room, go in to start the task, and more than likely finish the run with it incomplete. (Most tasks boil down to talking to the quest-giver, then progressing through the game until you hit the person/thing who has your item, then getting it, then praying the game spawns the room you need. It's truly terrible when these special rooms have rewards that let you advance another random-room's quest.) Then get the item, and hope the game some day lets the room spawn again so you can turn it in.
The bosses, should you die to them, require you to watch their slow, typed character by character, cutscene every time you want to refight them, not to mention any sort of runback you have to do to reach them(thankfully, the final boss at least [spoiler]leaves the other bosses from the boss rush dead, though that does mean farming weapon exp should be done before going for him.[/spoiler]) Other than the final boss, they are fairly simple fights, and if you've been unlocking weapons, you should be able to win on your first or second try. But the final boss is just a bad design. [spoiler]He covers a significant portion of the screen at times, is in the foreground so he hides you, enemies and obstacles(meaning you get stuck/take a lot of damage quickly), and his attacks can be unavoidable if he catches you in certain terrain. Plus, for a game with a ton of combat, you don't actually fight him. You run away. Good news is that the primary 'antagonist' has nothing to do with the final boss and just runs off when you initially confront him, so no closure there either.[/spoiler]
Story-wise, don't expect the level of the first one. The layers are much shallower here, casually tossed in and thin. Does have a decent ending for Turnip Boy though. The writing is similar humor-wise though, so that's fun.
Of my playtime, a good chunk was grind, trying to get a room to spawn, and dealing with the final boss. That is not what I want in a game.
