Seems like, other than the dogs... there isn't much else added to the formula of the first, in fact it seems like they removed (nearly all) environmental puzzles the first one had, which helped break up the pace. (ladders, pushing dumpsters, pallets, valves, etc) and they were replaced by just a few swinging rope sections, akin to Uncharted 4. The fuck?
It's also disappointing they didn't add anything to the players mechanical toolkit, in the first you could use a brick/bottle to make noise and troll the AI. In this sequel, it's exactly the same, nothing more added. I love this reviewer brings up DeusEx, Dishonored and Prey (2017) as games chock full of different systems to traverse the environments, troll the enemies, etc in comparison to this game it's very barebones. You do get the xray vision, but at least in the first one, I never really used it because it just feels like a cheap wallhack.
I love storytelling in games, but it could be that there was so much focus going into crafting a story, that everything else fell by the way side and gameplay became mere filler areas for the next cutscene, that's not very good, this is still a video game after all, right?! Even Kojima games, which are always compared to movies, are full of diferent gameplay mechanics.
As for the story itself though, it doesn't even seem like it's that good anyway, specially the later stages of the game...
At least, there seems to be a lot of exploration here, levels are bigger and wider, but it's a shame don't do anything with it, it's just going from A to B, you just need to find out where B is.