A pretty great sequel, with some very minor caveats. I'd recommend Ghostrunner 2 for everyone who enjoyed the first.

The story is way better in this one. Because of this players will have to spend more time talking and focusing on dialogue than in the first, which may be a downside to some. It definitely slows down the pacing for repeat playthroughs/speedruns, though thankfully, you can skip through all dialogue if you really do not care enough. The characters are better written, especially your machine companions AND antagonists. The character interactions in the newly introduced hub are however a bit less great. It's comparable to Starfield where you just stand there and they stare back while dialogue plays with some VERY awkward silences. Thankfully most of the dialogue is optional.

The gameplay is improved, but not nearly as much as some people say it is. There are a few more enemy types, some of which are great additions such as a Roller found later in the game, forcing you to think outside of the box sometimes. But most of the new enemy types are very weak and uninteresting, providing either an alternative to already existing enemies or just offering nothing new. There were also a few enemy types from the last game that did not get introduced until the late game, which left me wondering if the developers intended to have more unique enemy types but couldn't do it, or if the overall difficulty for this one was supposed to be lower than the first. Which ever answer it is, it does feel quite anticlimactic seeing the same enemies pop up in the late game, while in the first game they were there quite a bit earlier.

That is not to say that the gameplay is worse, because the game flows a lot smoother. There are quite a bit more parkour sections that often take up more time than the combat sections, usually it works quite well. The only problem I found with it is the little platforms you can grapple to your location, I simply do not understand why they appeared so late into the game while they work way worse than a simple grapple point. Some levels are a bit long compared to the first, but when the combat really works, it shines. More abilities, and a currency to buy them with and the motherboard system makes the possibilities in this game way more interesting.

The soundtrack to this game was a little less up my alley than the soundtrack to the first. Dan Terminus uses an upbeat, more classic synthwave approach that feels more like enjoying some good times, while having less punchy sound design. Arkadius Rejkowski composed the tracks that play during some of the more desolate segments of the game, and they work quite well, although they are sometimes a little too minimalistic for my taste. The style was bound to change with the fact that Daniel Deluxe only made two tracks in the entire game, but some of the tracks composed by the other composers work very well. A few standouts are "Mind as Universe", "The Temple", "Road Zero", "Already Dead" and "Protocol Overload".

Sadly (and this is probably just early days issues) some people seem to have quite bad performance, including myself. There is quite a bit of stuttering involved in this game, even when your overall framerate is very high the game sometimes just stops for about half a second to a second, usually resulting in suddenly seeing a "Critical Failure" on your screen. Hopefully the stutters can be worked out for the people who have it.

Overall, Ghostrunner 2 builds upon the story of the first quite well, while giving you way more to parkour with. The combat is a step up, when you actually get to fight lots of enemies, use all your abilities, and slowly figure out an encounter using every death, just like the first game. The soundtrack is great for the most part, although the unique style of Daniel Deluxe is pushed to the background in favor of mixed styles.

And hopefully this one will be just as fun to pour many hours into, optimizing speedrunning into oblivion just as the first.