So a bunch of us got this game and tried it out for a few hours. You can see my stream of it here:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1974409551It's essentially the exact same game as the first, but with an added player and an enhanced combat system. While there are some visual improvements I was kind of hoping it would look much better than it did. You still get the pink haired black people randomly chosen as your default on character creation, and the quest NPCs are ugly as well. The story is the same forgettable buzz, only somehow they've made the NPCs more annoying.
By far the greatest addition is that of a fourth player character. With 4 people you can now reasonably split up and cover more ground making the overworld movement much more involved. Though we haven't actually done that yet since we were a little too hung up on the older tactics from the first game. We traveled and entered combat in a group as much as possible, but that may not have been the best way forward.
The combat has also been improved, with a second row for your 4 niggas, and you can move around to a limited extent on your turn. It's nothing too complex but characters in the back rows have a small boost to their dodge, and front ranks can protect squares directly behind them with their shield. You can also throw grenades to hurt enemies and create persistent hazards on certain squares.
You can hire NPC mercenaries now too, with the NPC choosing their own action in combat. With every player being able to hire their own mercenary you might be able to have 8v8 fights in this game.
For some reason, you can't set up your party composition on this combat grid and every fight you enter in what feels like a random arrangement. Though front liners and back liners stay in their particular area, you still can't arrange your characters before the fights. It's possible it has something to do with their location in the overworld, but I doubt it. If there is a way to set up the party combat order, we didn't find one.
The UI is filled with unintuitive and clunky design choices, which is weird considering the previous game did those a bit better. There's a goddamn loading screen before and after combat which could go for as long as 10 seconds for fucks sake. It was instantaneous in the first game. And the game in general runs like ass compared to how lightweight it looks. I hope these issues will be fixed in time.
The chaos system has been changed a little bit, and now has unique effects based on where you are up to in the story. I'm not sure I like it much. The first story quest had a chaos mechanic that just straight up failed you if enough time passes. Nothing like the previous game which made every encounter harder for each stack of chaos, but you could keep pushing forward through it if you wanted to, though you aren't likely to live long through them. Maybe some of the later chaos mechanics have cooler gimmicks.
The game is now separated into chapters too, there's 5 in total and I expect you'd unlock the second chapter on completion of the first. It's a little disappointing to have the world spanning adventure broken up like this. The first game had a bunch of scenarios that got added to it over the years, so if these function similarly and are just as difficult to clear as them it would be nice.
Despite all the issues we had I'd be up for playing more.