Visually, It retains the same style the first game had while also providing unique environments throughout the open world. The bugs and glitches, which were a major, game breaking issue in the first game, are a lot less frequent this time around but there are still problems. The game is very prone to freezing at various times throughout the game and the only way to fix it is to close out the game and lose whatever progress you made. It's quite frustrating at times.
The gameplay is still very much the same, Which is gonna be a big plus for fans of the first game. I love that the hud is a lot less cluttered than it was in the first game and it's a lot easier to switch out various abilities as well. Another big plus is that you can now hotkey 4 abilities to the left bumper button. This allows you to continue the flow of the game without having to constantly open and close the menu to switch out abilities. A big change for Darksiders 2 is that they added level based gear and item drops to the world. This provides another much-needed RPG element to the game and makes it so you don't feel like you are just playing out the game normally, You could actually grind it out a bit to level up and find better gear.
And from that, we segway into the game's biggest problem. Despite having a massive open world, There is actually very little to truly explore or better yet have something that is worth exploring. There are very few characters you can actually talk to and the dialogue choices are pretty much non-existent. And aside from the 18-19 story missions to complete, There's only a very small handful of side missions to do and most of those are generic fetch quests that aren't worth completing. What is the point in offering such a large world and having absolutely nothing to do with it? I think this game would have benefitted from a smaller map, Where everything is a bit more condense but more easily accessible.
Other flaws of the game I noticed was that the story was very uninteresting and didn't keep me even somewhat excited about playing through it to figure out what happens. The difficulty definitely fluxes throughout, even if set on easy, and that came make some encounters annoyingly frustrating while you can fly through other sections with ease. And just to go back to the storytelling, It's such a big disappointment for me because this Darksiders universe is filled with interesting characters but they just don't explore them. I think there'd be a huge, positive impact if they actually bothered to flesh out the story and add other side plots into the game. And the final nail in the coffin - It's repetitive and boring. It takes about 20 hours to complete the campaign and I only enjoyed the first 3-4, Everything after that is just a boring grind for me.
Overall: 6/10
Darksiders 2 fixes a good majority of the issues the first game has but there are still so many flaws. Bugs are still a slight issue, There's very little storytelling and it's painfully repetitive. There just isn't enough variety in the game to give it a higher score.