goofy enemies like cyborg assassins
Given that they are near identical to SS1 cyborg assassins (pretty much the only difference is that SS1 version had slightly different headgear, no-glow shurikens and also used rifles) - no dice.
SS2 story also wouldn't be bad if not for the self-inconsistent premise.
DraQ, it seems you're forcing certain comparisons to make SS2 look bad IMO, like with the hardware/implants thing.
IMO there are two ways of looking at SShocks.
From pure player POV they are quite an even match, maybe even with SS2 being slightly superior.
The (few) things SS2 does right - the atmosphere and mechanics reinforcing horror elements mostly - are simply *that* effective and the few areas where it actually expands upon SS1 (anything scarcity related, hacking in-world objects, psi, active security, even research) don't hurt either.
From development/design excellence POV SS1 simply leaves SS2 in the dust.
There is simply no contest here, folks doing SS1 were cramming tons of complex interlocking mechanics (in the time when popping monsters in simple raycaster engine was seen as state of the art) along with advanced tech in a single game and made it all work together while keeping the game cohesive and playable. In comparison SS2 is an awful hackjob, already behind its time technologically, tripping all over itself in terms of half its gameplay elements and failing to implement even some of the cooler tried and true mechanics from its prequel (in SS1 they rendered multiple viewports and implemented dynamic lighting and some limited sprite filtering on hardware that today amounts to a toaster, in SS2 they couldn't figure out which alpha blending mode to use for lazors to avoid them sucking visually). It's a miracle SS2 works AT ALL as a game, never mind working as well as it does.
The thing is, SS2's designers knew that they were cramming back in all the Ultima Underworld complexity that was deliberately taken out of SS1, with the stats and spellcasting and that there wasn't room to keep everything in there like SS1's hardware, so a lot of the SS1 hardware stuff was spread around the game instead of staying in one place, like you don't need Skates when you have speed hypos to inject, and you don't need a Flashlight hardware when you can light up the area with the laser rapier.
Except hardware in SS1 was cool, SS2 stats are at best just plain, at worst fundamentally misdesigned.
The fun thing about skates wasn't that they made you go fast, but that they completely changed how you moved while also making you go fast. Most of the things - hardware, weapons and explosives had controls that could be tweaked to alter their effects - from power sliders and overload button for energy weapons, to timers on explosives to different modes for hardware. Meanwhile in SS2 rapier didn't even use charge despite being energy weapon, working instead as a slightly more powerful, slightly longer wrench, didn't actually burn targets contrary to its '?' description, but instead dealt somewhat enhanced damage to those particular enemies that you'd rather prefer to keep away from your face while they explode and that should take reduced damage from anything that mostly cauterizes organics. And there few actual places where you'd even need a light source in SS2, despite using much more powerful engine and lighting system, so yeah, glowy rapier is sort of cool except it's nearly useless and as a weapon it's both worse and less distinct than its SS1 counterpart.
To give you an example on why some might think SS2 is better, here's what your options are when dealing with radiation in SS1 vs SS2, in SS1 you can wear the hazard suit hardware and use the detox patches you can find in the world, in SS2 you can choose to buy extra rad hypos, you can wear a hazard suit whenever there's radiation around, or you can use the Rad Shield psi power, or raise your Endurance stat via cyber modules or with the EndurBoost implant, or use the Psi Power that raises your Endurance stat since if you reach END 8 you are pretty much immune to radiation.
So you can mitigate or endure radiation in 3 more excitingly mutually redundant ways? How about you keep your fucking +1END amulet and give me back my fucking jetpack?
Another aspect is that where you lose abilities like jump jets you also gain new ones in their place like teleportation and creating physical forcefields.
Except teleportation doesn't expand traversable level area in any way, it just allows quick return to previously visited location and physical forcefields, while cool are very expensive to cast and so mostly used for soma transference cheese.
In jetpack VS teleportation case it's exactly like saying that Oblivion improved over Morrowind because even though you lost levitation, you gained fast travel - fucking yay.
If you missed grenades being more complex the devs still made an effort to fill that gap by giving you proximity grenade ammo for the launcher that can be set off later and psionic land mines, the complexity is roughly the same it's just not concentrated in the same way.
The complexity is not even close. Proximity grenades are just weaker grenades that can be used to create (lousy) traps. In SS1 you could create traps with anything - proximity, time or manually triggered (with guns), you could lob grenades with varying strength and at varying angles including around the corners, perpendicularly to your facing, you could adjust timers, you could form chains of explosions, you could even leave live explosives bobbing in the air in grav shafts.
That's the main difference between SS2 and SS1 - SS1 allows you to mix and match mechanics to your heart's content, allowing you to sculpt your own custom solutions to in-game situations, while in SS2 individual mechanics are streamlined, spread apart, prevented from interacting and centred around codified, canned solutions. Being able to mitigate radiation in roughly the same way with either suit, or PSI or +END (or +END from PSI, or +END from implant, or +END from hypo) doesn't expand the game in any meaningful way. Being able to roll through irradiated area on rocket-boosted skates simultaneously wearing eviro-suit, and slicing bots with laser rapier while hopped up on reflex patch OTOH does.
That's frequent trap of mindlessly adding RPG elements - by slicing the available solution space it streamlines the experience and guides it towards codified premade solutions along the lines of "if stealthy, seek vent shaft to crawl through" we've seen in DX:HR.
