Absolutely fantastic game. Extremely addicting, very satisfying gunplay, animation, sounds, everything looks and feels great.
Comparatively with the first game it is a bit more difficult, though a lot of skills, weapon, and enemy knowledge carry over. Only two factions currently compared to the first game's three.
Instead of doing piecemeal DLC to unlock other equipment like the first game this one opts for a battle pass style of using points attained through gameplay to unlock new items, with each tier of possible unlocks opening up once you hit thresholds of points spent. The battle pass acts as a separate, shorter unlock track that takes the same points. You can buy the battle pass track through the Super Citizen edition or for ten dollars, or by completing most of the free upgrade tracks and using the premium currency it provides to unlock the other track for free.
Compared to the first, which had no free option for unlocking premium equipment, I would consider this more fair, as it'd be a grind, but is totally doable, and it helps that equipment from either upgrade track seem decently balanced, you are not incentivized to get the battle pass equipment because they're better.
Lastly, the game is a technical mess at the moment. It runs very well and smoothly, everything feels great, nothing is awkward or overly wonky, but then the game just crashes or disconnects you, or you can't connect in the first place. There have been rapid patches, but it isn't clear if these are helping or worsening the issue, as after two or so patches I played for a few hours yesterday and between the four of us disconnected and crashed numerous times.
Still, it's a testament to how extremely thoroughly well designed and executed the game is that I'll still come back and play more. Arrowhead know how to make an excellent game, just seems they were not prepared for this level of success, I didn't see it coming either. I only pray they get it together and smoothen it out soon so people can just enjoy it. The first game ended up really smooth and problem free, so I expect HD2 to end up the same, the only question is how long it'll take.