The game lacks some of the charm and things that made the first one feel fun.
I think everything got a bit longer and samey. The upgrades are sort of boring and have way too many levels. There is too much level up for bonuses that feel flat and somewhat disjointed. There's just to much interface clutter with rng manipulation (banish rerolls). Too many levels up interruptions.

I liked the original Gunlocked. It was a good game that had a very specific vision and played to its strengths. This sequel... Doesn't?

Just like this sequel, the original game had mostly autonomous weapons. Some of them you could aim to some degree, but for the most part everything worked by itself. Because of this a lot of weapons had weird firing patterns such as an area right in front of your ship or a random area on the screen. This is where most of the difficulty came from- balancing the weird firing patterns against a screen full of enemies and obstacles.

This sequel ramps up a lot of the weird firing patterns and makes enemies far faster, far more unpredictable, and just generally obnoxious to play against. Bosses are the worst as they all have some gimmick or off-putting trait like long invulnerability windows; this stretches out combat to the point of frustration... AND, there's an obvious cut in the music where it repeats, which, once you hear it, it really starts to grate on your nerves.

Overall, it feels like a step back from the original. The original was tightly focused and just seemed to work, while this one seems like there's a lot of stuff added in that just isn't fun to engage with. There are a lot of keyword stuff here for weapons and it turns choosing upgrades into more of a literacy test with figuring out what means what and how that interacts with what you have. Sometimes it feels like that meme where a guy is holding a butterfly and asking if it's X- like, is this a lock-on weapon? Is this a beacon? I don't know. Interactions aren't exactly clear, which makes the other issues with the game more obvious.

For $12, this game is a hard sell when Gunlocked, the original, is less than half that price and altogether a better play. I might recommend this game on a deep sale, but generally it's just not that great.