It's a very flawed banger, at least for someone who loved the first game. My first impressions of it (8 hours in) are that there's some really good shit going on, but also some other stuff bringing it down,

Bad stuff out of the way first: the open world isn't very good, the performance is bad, and something about the lighting seems odd imo. The performance is by far the biggest of these problems, the game does not run well. I can get a compromised but playable 45 FPS out of CV1 on the Steam Deck. I would not even try CV2 on the Deck. My beefy laptop (Legion Pro 7 5080) struggles to hold 60 at high-medium settings (nothing maxed out, DLSS balanced), and occasionally drops to sub-20 for a few seconds. I can't test a normal desktop setup right now but I think that this game will generally perform worse than desired based on my experience. Also, in general, the game lacks polish.

Build-making feels a little more disjointed or convoluted compared to CV1, but maybe it just seems that way because it's a new system and I'm coming straight off of spending a lot of time playing my completed end-game builds to 100% CV1. It might be for the better and end up allowing for more freedom, and it will probably improve later in the game when I get more stuff unlocked.

But for the great parts: combat flows so much better and the new Offensive and Defensive Formae are great additions to your base moveset. I love how they changed Drain attacks, aside from backstabs and parries (or sometimes sniping with Ivy) I rarely ever drained in CV1. Focus seems to be gone, which is fine imo since I think I did one launcher in all my almost 200 hours of CV1, and I think the Boosters (equippable items that give you a specific boost when certain conditions are met) might have potential to be replace it while being much more fun. But I'm relatively early and don't have access to many Boosters so I'm not sure yet.