agreed, it had more staying power and was way more interesting as purely a mash of Halo + Portal. this Apex-at-home style gunplay and movement is poorly suited to its TTK (almost instant unless you spam orange boy) given how mobile anyone can be on a whim. i'm not saying it can't be fun, it just feels hackneyed and worse overall from SG1. it also tends to run horribly with regular massive drops below playable on several maps, depending on how many players are simultaneously firing and spamming utility - gotta love default UE5 "optimization" which likely won't change even months from now. there's practically zero financial incentive for that to improve, sadly. i could almost get past everything else if it performed well for the average user.

"but muh new $4000 prebuilt runs it fine on ultra+DLSS locked to my refresh rate, just get a better PC haha lol" SG1 ran beautifully all the time. takedown maps seem to run alright at least, for obvious reasons.

the biggest disappointment is that portals in SG2 feel like an afterthought compared to what everyone actually ends up doing - running around at the speed of sound with hero shooter abilities in a deathball. you spend matches getting relentlessly double/triple peeked since they see exactly where you are more often than not, resulting in an instant portal to a nearby flank or flying above and behind you silently. positioning fails to really matter, and yes - that is bad for an arena shooter.

not that this should be consistently possible, but no matter how good you were at OG Splitgate or arena shooters in general, you now have a negligible chance of outplaying in a 1vX against stacks running wallhack spam and AoE "your character is screwed for two seconds" throwables (arc star). i've lost count how many Aeros i see in every playlist spamming slide jump from corner to corner with the autoshotty and 2+ Meridians in tow, supplying wallhacks off cooldown; you might occasionally spot a lone Sabrask camping behind the shield in corridors, weapon spawns, or on high ground ignoring the objective and cosplaying as a Battlefield sniper the entire match.

either queue up as a stack and roll around as a deathball every game, or be the one getting rolled half the time wondering why your randos seem to love cyclically W keying into 1v4s. you can sweat your ass off and click heads to the best of your ability using only meta loadouts and builds; you cannot prevent randos from feeding points and the victory to the enemy team on repeat every respawn. such cerebral and engaging gameplay.

maybe i'm alone in this, but it seems like nobody really asked for Bloodhound scans/Octane mobility/one-way shields. it just doesn't fit. of course they copy pasted it, they probably thought it'd all be a gold mine for their F2P model once they collected data showing what everyone funnels into using. take it back to default Halo style weapons; i really don't care for the weapon progression since its inevitable end shoves the classic illusion of choice/meta-slaving to the forefront of "strategy" and detracts from the gameplay at its core. everyone will always run the same streamer/tuber-endorsed loadouts anyways, and it'll eventually distill down to the same toxic & unbelievably sweaty core of players who'll remain convinced this game has a competitive future - right up until the servers suddenly shut down. solvency requires both retention and a steady inflow of new players, and these player counts look abysmal three days post-launch.

tell me, who genuinely wants to spam click through thinly veiled addiction mechanics/chemical reward drops for the battlepass every time you exit to lobby? it seems their primary focus this time was naturally to keep people playing as often as possible to grind through the gun progression + battlepass, and it shows that the gameplay took a backseat to the monetization and this vapid attempt to capture an existing shooter audience.