Nothing. It's legitimately great. But it doesn't matter. You can't give money to Anita fucking Sarkeesian in 2026 and not expect massive blowback. These negative reviews were earned.

Well, it's largely the same as the first game. They added a couple of new characters which are okay, but they removed the watcher which was the most fun class in the first one.

They made a lot of the elite fights a lot harder, and in my opinion that makes the game less interesting because it encourages you to play it very safe (which was already the right thing to do in the first one normally, but in STS2 you just get extra punished for trying to do more elites)

They also severely nerfed the boss relics, most of them don't give extra energy and a lot of the time the three you get offered are next to useless. I'm not necessarily against making the game harder, but doing it in that particular way just makes one feel useless and it's a huge nerf to the more energy-hungry cards which are the cards I find most interesting.

On top of that, they crippled one of the most fun builds in STS1 which was defect orbs. Now you can only gain temporary focus (until the end of turn), never permanently, so you don't have the same scaling that defect used to have and it just feels horrible to play. In exchange they gave him another type of build which is status-based, it's actually quite fun but still.

Most importantly it just doesn't have the library of mods that the first game had, and it won't for many years if ever. I could see the game becoming good later down the line if they add the watcher back, fix some of the issues and mods get developed for it, but right now it's absolutely not worth it, the first game is in a much better state