Managed to get me into another replay despite mixed feelings.

This game, in a way, made the same mistakes that its predecessor, but also had the same things I liked.

+ very nice and memorable NPCs
+ some romance options, a couple pretty convoluted (Daeran and Sosiel?)
+ different unique classes
+ a plethora of quests and locations and ways to resolve stuff
+ choices really do matter
+ beautiful small easter eggs for Pathfinder Kingmaker players
+ different mythic classes, they have unique powers and gameplay

- The crusade is even worse than running a kingdom in the first installment, and running on auto locks you out of a lot of shit
- Your companions already have classes and abilities assigned to them which often suck, and some of them you meet so late in the game that they will always be subpar to any mercenary :( I hope Owlcats will finally enable to retrain everyone without mods! Please, please!
- It's very uneven again, after getting send to THE PLACE (to avoid spoilers) in act 3 or 4 you are playing a clanky 3d-ish location and all the stuff you did beforehand in the crusade doesn't really matter because you start with a blank slate after that event again... like whyyyyyy

For me it was a down -up - down kind of situation.

As a D&D 5e vet it was super difficult to grasp the mechanics at the beginning, then I had a very long great period, and I abandoned it at act 5, which was more like "okay wtf is this now???" kind of situation.

The game is super uneven and unless you lower the difficulty, you are unable to do classic adventuring, because of the kingdom management part, which I was not the biggest fan of. There were a lot of moments I adored, but also this game is very, very uneven.

I'd say a solid 4- / 3.5 stars.