I've made a couple of posts about it already, but I'm currently playing through Deadly Premonition 2 after randomly seeing it on sale for 2 euros, which was about as much as I was willing to pay for it.

Deadly Premonition 1 is one of my favourite games of all time and it's sad how much worse DP2 is on every level, but the most shocking thing about it is how bad it looks. I don't mean that in the sense that it doesn't look like a triple-A game, I mean that it looks just straight up ugly and unfinished. The animations are stiff and awkward, the cutscenes are badly directed and the game world is a flat square with cheap unity assets strewn about with floating models everywhere. It's especially shocking given how D4, Swery's last game with Access Games, was incredibly well animated, stylish and full of energy in its presentation.

I can only assume Swery and the devs were working with just a fraction of the money they had even for Deadly Premonition 1 which wasn't exactly a looker either, but DP2 just looks unappealing as hell. Despite looking like a time-displaced PS2 game on the Xbox 360, DP1 was actually pretty impressive in terms of its ambition and scale, like you could tell the dev team were really trying to make something that was out of their reach. You don't really get that at all with DP2. They cut so many fun mechanics from DP1, like the ability to peek into NPC's houses to spy on them and to get an insight into their personal lives. The characters are much worse written in general. There's so many over-the-top QUIRKY and WACKY characters with some kind of catch phrase or verbal tic that they're constantly repeating in almost every line of dialogue.

York's been flanderised too. His entire personality is now about movies, and he brings them up in every conversation, where in the first game he mostly talked about movies with Zach on long car rides. York's a complete weirdo 100% of the time where in the first game he could pass off as a mostly normal if inconsiderate and eccentric human being most of the time