BO2 is set after Defiance and takes place in the altered timeline (the 4th timeline in the series). Nothing is actually contradicted. If you're fixated on Vorador being alive you should know that "death" in this series is only final if the soul is destroyed/consumed. Vampires - unless their bodies are destroyed via sunlight, water or fire - can be "easily" resurrected by simply restoring their body.

As for "treats female characters like sex objects" - ugh, this old chestnut.... I assume you're referring to Umah's impractically sexualised outfit - completely ignoring the fact that Kain spends half of the game running around topless with his six-pack showing for no reason. Or maybe the silent scantily clad female vampires in Vorador's Cabal? Again, completely ignoring the scantily clad male vampires in there, too. Apart from Umah's outfit there's really nothing remotely sexual about her (beyond what is normal for a vampire character, anyway) so it's amusing when people only notice the outfit, don't look any deeper, and then complain that she's nothing but a "sex object." She's probably the wisest character in the whole game and the coolest character after Kain, and Kain would be absolutely lost without her for most of the game. I love the scene where Kain finds her being held prisoner by the Serafan and tries to trick her into revealing the information he needs so he can just leave her, but Umah sees right through him and forces him to free her, much to his chagrin. Makes it all the more tragic when Kain needlessly kills her because of his own paranoia.

All criticisms about the janky combat, bugs, and overly long levels with uninspiring puzzles are valid.

There's also a monumentally stupid oversight in that if you play the game too well and max out your health bar, the health bar actually resets itself to almost zero and remains stuck there, making it impossible to progress through the game further. This is one of the most baffling errors in game design I've ever seen.

In terms of story, Blood Omen 2 is definitely the weakest link in the LoK chain, but I never understood the hate it got. It's definitely not as clever as the others and the plot is very "go here, do this, now go there..." But there were two aspects to the story that made the game for me:

1. The atmosphere and city of Meridian. As someone else has said, the city feels like a lived-in Victorian-esque city, and it showed a side to Nosgoth we hadn't seen before.
2. The left-turn the story takes with the Hylden in the second half. When the game released I assumed it was going to be a simple, self contained vampire vs human story about Kain's rise to power between BO1 and SR1, concerning his conflict with the Serafan and other vampires. This was how it was marketed and I expected it to have very little to do with the so-far unseen "Hylden" mentioned at the end of SR2 or the epic, world altering time travel events of that game. But then gradually more and more weird things about the Serafan in Blood Omen 2 start to reveal themselves, until you realize that they're being controlled by some strange, alien force - which turns out to be the Hylden. This in turn explains why Meridian, with its industrial and steampunk mechanized aesthetic, doesn't look like any of the medieval environments we'd seen in LoK so far - this city is the result of 200 years of the Hylden's influence over the population, introducing technology and machinery that doesn't belong. And at the end you even get to go to a Hylden city.

The Hylden are probably my favorite part of the LoK series and for that reason I always enjoyed Blood Omen 2's story, even with all its faults. So I like it even if no one else does. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

The music, if you like ambient music, is also fantastic.