This game takes all of the features of the first part and improves them significantly.
What I enjoyed most:
- the beautiful environments,
- open world full of interesting encounters,
- responsive, carefully constructed factions to support or oppose,
- endless tactical options, especially with dual classing,
- the shanties and tavern music.
I particularly like how the designers painted a setting inspired by historical themes, like colonialism, progress vs tradition, faith and antitheism, without giving it an ideological slant. It feels like a colorful, living world that has it's brutal moments and macabre locations.
What are the weak points:
- short main quest,
- shallow companion quests.
Both of these are tradeoffs for the wide open world and numerous sidequests. While the companions have short quests, all of them are interesting in a way. You'll probably like some of them, and despise others, which is a mark of good writing, in my opinion.
Continuing the weak points:
- ship combat might as well not be there,
- some convoluted mechanics, especially armor penetration,
- some performance issues: long load times and memory leak (making the game work slower and slower until you have to restart it).
As a fan of the genre, this is now one of my favorite games, especially after all the improvements brought in the patches and DLCs.
Closing notes:
Recent patches have brought an experimental turn-based mode as opposed to the original real time with pause. Not my thing, did not check it out.
The highest difficulty level can be brutal in the beginning if you do not use the best tactics.