For the most part, it's very similar to the first one in that it provides a decent RE4-like experience with its own weird dream-like flavor added to it...but at the same time, it's also unfortunately very similar in its janky feel, which I was hoping would be improved in this sequel.
To be clear, I'm not talking about the fact that your character moves slowly and runs out of breath easily and all that jazz which is common for a horror game to make it scary: I'm talking about how the game just doesn't feel polished due to having a lack of input buffering, awkward animations, weird transitions, terrible collisions, wonky camera work, and just loads of glitches that screw you over when trying to pull off moves like the predator dash even when you're deliberate and delicate as possible. It isn't just the controls which are bad either, as the jank extends beyond to straight-up crashes to desktop which I experienced a few over my playtime.
In truth, all of this is the reason why this is actually my second attempt at playing this, with my first one ending early because the feel was just that bad that I quit. It's only because I had such a sudden craving for this genre that I picked it back up and, to give it some credit, stuck with it this time. And I suppose that would sum up my feelings for this game: if you're craving more action horror, this does have some good in it and can satisfy those cravings...but I'd only really recommend it if you're scraping the bottom of the barrel. Not bad, but not great: a classic 7/10, I suppose.
A few more notes on my experience:
*I did quite enjoy the more open-world aspect of the game where you've got these big town sections to explore, somewhat similar to Silent Hill. I found myself rather engrossed in sneaking around and canvassing the entire area, hoovering up all the hidden supplies and checking out all the side quests and points of interest, which were all pretty neat since they usually felt like handcrafted setpieces instead of just checklist fodder. The game eventually switches back to a more linear adventure which made me worried that I was being sold a false bill of goals, but more open-world exploration does reoccur later on, forming a nice back-and-forth between different modes of play.
*The crossbow is back again and I quite like it in terms of weapon design, but the game really only seems to consider the handgun, shotgun and crossbow as part of its arsenal, as despite finding other weapons later on like a sniper rifle, flamethrower and assault rifle, they are pretty bad and never get any sort of ammo drops or feel like a part of the combat design. Feels like a weird afterthought.
*Speaking about combat, I quite liked the usage of matches in the first Evil Within: while they were a bit awkward to learn how to use, eventually setting up multi-match kills felt just as cool as pulling off Leon's roundhouse kicks in RE4. Unfortunately matches are completely absent in this game and nothing really takes its place, making the combat feel ultimately lesser. I got excited when I saw that you can get a kick upgrade, but it's terrible as it barely does any damage and not only doesn't set up the kicked enemy for a follow-up stomp, but doesn't even knock over other enemies. The other potentially interesting upgrades for stuff like slow-mo are prohibitively expensive that I never bothered.
*The story is ok, but it does something I'm not fond of which I've dubbed 'the Far Cry 3 maneuver', in that they put a lot of focus on establishing an interesting villain...only to unceremoniously dump them half-way through and have the rest of the game try and force you to care about this new villain which hasn't had anything setup for them previously to make the twist exciting and are ultimately less interesting.
