1 step forward and 3 steps back.

Ghostrunner 1 was a fantastic novel idea that was also quite well executed. Straightforward high skill and high risk gameplay with a couple of quirks that need to be ironed out for it to be a perfect game.
For Ghostrunner 2, the devs decided to not address any of the issues and instead add unnecessary bloat to the game and still somehow end up making it shorter than GR1 while also making it feel unbearably tedious to play.

One thing they did fix is the stuttering. Game now properly compiles shaders on launch and I only encountered a very handful of hitches which did not hurt my gameplay. But as it is a trend with modern gaming, the graphics got worse and performance nosedived as well. So if you won't be stuttering this time, you will sure as hell get lower FPS. Especially in the outdoors levels where it can straight up be 1/3rd of what it is in the tower levels.

Speaking of the outside. Do you want to be immersed in the bright neon cyberpunk dystopia that was so well made in GR1? Well tough luck buddy as this time you will be spending most of the game either in a desert wasteland outside the tower or in some weird monochrome metal mega structures (and no it doesn't look as cool as it sounds). With the lighting so terrible you will be double checking your game settings.

So gameplay then. You have a stamina bar now which used up by dashes and blocking. You can dash about 4 times immediately without upgrades. You can hold right click to block bullets. You can still time left click to block single bullets as well but for one, that mechanic is even more broken than in GR1, and for 2, the deflect augment doesn't work on it. So if you want to deflect, you HAVE to press right click to enter the block mode and that pissed me off.
You have a lot more energy now too, allowing you to use abilities more often. Augment puzzle is gone and is replaced by a generic system where you gather chips to increase your augment capacity and then buy augments at the station to put them in empty spaces.

So why is all of this bad? For one that is the pacing and the size of the levels. Most levels are now obnoxiously huge. To the point that in an arena getting to an enemy can legit feel like a chore. I also believe there is only 1 or 2 new enemies. The bike sections are way worse than they look in trailers. That thing is an uncontrollable mess that does not even let you use your mouse to look around. The bike levels are also way longer than they need to be. With the worst offender being a level that took me 48 minutes to beat (no not because I kept dying, but because it took THAT long to drive to all 3 locations, do some parkouring there and press the button). And it genuinenly *felt* like I was stuck there for at least 2 hours.
The Cybervoid does return and this time it features combat in there. Which becomes quicky very annoying as it is very hard to see anything in the Cybervoid. Also it has inconsistent color scheme where some orange things such as pipes and rails cannot be used until you turn them blue.. but then you get other orange things which can be used.

Story is so bad I won't even bother discussing it. GR1 may not have had excellent story but at least it set a good foundation for worldbuilding and had some interesting points. GR2 story and places you visit honestly remove any immersion that the first game had.

TLDR:
Play the first game.

i love it when the ghostrunner said "it's ghostrunning time!" and ghostran all over the place
12/10

I don't understand why people who enjoyed the first one are complaining.

By introducing blocking and skills the devs made fighting arguably a bit more casual, however it is still challenging. Boss fights are novel and will make u sweat a bit.

What u absolutely can't argue about is the new parkour system. They've developed it even further and it got infinitely better and more diverse.

Overall it's a great game and an even better sequel. U don't need to play the first one if u didn't. This one is just better in almost every aspect.