Shoddy work. At least it's free2play.
I'm afraid I can't provide much context for the game, as I never played the first one at all. This doesn't seem to be too big of an issue, however, as the game itself doesn't provide any context for itself. Period. You have three "distinct" factions, which I suppose are all separate by a made-up backstory and their own reasons for being on this desolate (yet brightly-lit) planet, but I have no idea what those might be, as they're never really stated, or explained. To be honest, there's no story whatsoever. The three factions seem to be mostly distinguished by their color, and the aesthetic differences in their guns and vehicles, which are fairly minor (minor enough that I often have trouble telling friendly from hostile, and I'm clearly not the only one…).
There are a lot of things I could pick at, but the biggest and most glaring is the graphics. It's never a good thing when the first instant you plunge into a game, you're immediately underwhelmed. The best adjective I could provide to describe the overall quality is "dated", maybe with an "extremely" before that. Even with every possible setting maxed, the game just looks rough, and reminiscent of things produced 5-7 years ago. The scenery and buildings are sometimes fun to look at, from a distance, because of their sheer size/magnitude/etc, but overall, the graphics are a mixture of unimpressive and bad. And as immediately off-putting as that is, it's not the worst part. The player models are even worse than the rest and the animations they're programmed with are almost of epically bad proportions. The running and jumping is abysmal, and make me think of Doom or Diablo II (except set, supposedly, in a modern fast-paced FPS MMO); they somehow make them seem almost like cardboard cut-outs. Even the vehicles seem to kind of hover around like cardboard tanks being pushed around like children.
All of this might be forgiven, might be, except the rest of the game is just as depressing. The gun play is unremarkable in almost every conceivable way. The guns all feel awkward, really awkward. They have recoil and other pseudo-realistic attributes, but they feel anything except real, or good, or powerful. It really evokes feelings of "oh I just killed that guy with my silent, plastic gun" or, more often "he just killed me with his." Even the sniper rifles seem to fire at the speed of smell, allowing you to see the bullet drop over a ridiculously short distance. Of these poorly implemented weapons, there are about 20 in number, with only minor variations in look and purpose, many of which are shared by the different classes.
That brings us to the next shortcoming: the "rpg" elements. I could describe how the unlocks in greater detail, but to be honest, it's very much a pay-to-win-kind-of version of Battlefield 3. That is, you could legitimately play and unlock every element of the game by simply playing; i.e. shooting things, capturing things, etc. SoE claims you can't simply pay to win in Planetside 2, but let me clarify the truth behind this: There are two sets of unlocks for any given class: Weapons and skills aka "certs". Weapons are pretty straightforward, and by the way, can all be simply bought using real money. Certs are usually passive bonuses like being able to take a little more damage, etc. and incidentally, take much less experience points to acquire, by and large. So no, you can't pay to win everything, but you can pay to win most of it, and the areas you can simply buy can be acquired much easier than the areas you can.
Next, note that the classes are both poorly defined, and mostly a blatant Battlefield rip-off. The metaphor continues. The game features six class of varying degrees of distinctness: The Infiltrator, Light Assault, Heavy Assault, Combat Medic, Engineer, and Max. Each class has its own set of weaponry (a lot of which is shared between them), a unique health/shield pool, and its own special ability. Now note that several of the class abilities area fairly similar, or perhaps downright identical in design. Also note that the differences between light and heavy assault are minute (one moves faster and carriers slightly smaller guns, and the other moves a little slower with slightly larger guns). The infiltrator usually does little infiltration, as it is usually concerned with sniping players from afar. The engineer builds things and blows up other things. The Max is sort of a half-machine, heavy-weapon toting, walking tank. These present two problems. First, like previously mentioned, there are unnecessary iterations of classes that could easily be combined into fewer, more robust, classes. They're also virtually identical to the Battlefield standards. Secondly, they're horribly unbalanced. To certain extent, being good at a FPS will allow you to be competitive, but only to a certain extent. The rest is a mixture of exploiting game mechanics, and griefing. When you aren't being killed by aimbotting snipers, you're being killed by someone flying in rapid circles with a jetpack. To summarize, speed and range kills. In this way I'm reminded more of Tribes: Ascend, or games like it. The power of heavier units' guns are mostly wasted, as quicker units can just constantly evade and pick away at them with fast automatic weapons or shotguns (or just shoot them from a distance with sniper rifles). All classes, however, are equally bad at matching up with vehicles, who can typically just roll in and start rapidly killing everything in sight.
The vehicles show some hollow promise that the game once again fails to live up to. First of all, the game introduces a system in which vehicles cost resources to generate (which are accumulated by factions controlling specific points). However that's pretty much the only restriction on vehicles, outside of specific certs for individuals. You have to spend upgrade points to be able to use some vehicles, but quite a few can be created and driven from the get go. The vehicles cost little, and have no identifiable limitation for quota (outside of available resources), to such an extent that almost everyone could have their own if they really wanted to (and given their strength in combat, that isn't necessarily a bad idea). In other words, an extreme lack of balance. There are some cool moments however. The multiplayer vehicles, in particular, are fun to ride around in. A flying transport that can hold 12 players is pretty cool (Pilot, 4 gunners, and 7 passengers), but good luck actually communicating the availability of that transport to nearby players, or getting them to jump in.
That leaves us with the game's final failure: presentation. The game promises an "MMO FPS, with massive planetary combat, where three factions vie for control of resources via all-out war, featuring team-based objectives, etc. etc." The reality, however, is far less impressive. The worlds themselves are both too big and too small. The map is actually not as big as it might seem; you could easily, barring death by another player, walk from one corner to the other in under 90 minutes, and drive/fly it in far less than that. However, they're big enough that the spread of the objectives leaves the game's action in limbo most of the time. Even in a "High" population server, like the one I played on, the general action of the game seemed to be "wtf should I go? I dunno, just kinda go somewhere and do something." There are merits to those kinds of things. Star Wars Galaxies was famous for "go do whatever, and have a hell of a lot of fun doing it" However, as said before, these worlds just aren't big enough to "go explore", and furthermore, there's nothing to be gained from going anywhere that other players aren't. You're not going to wander off and find a hidden boss, or weapon, or a hidden base. It's straight forward FPS combat, with lots of dreary, poorly textured terrain in between. Given that, the game feels like a much larger Battlefield match (sorry for the running analogy, but it's true), with a large helping of confusion, and a side of confused chaos. Three, high-tech organizations with futuristic weaponry and vehicles can't manage to coordinate troop movement? Right… Well, perhaps that's not fair. There is an unhelpful map you can look at, when you're not reading the adolescent-level team chat in the chat window at the top left of the screen. Just don't look for strategy here, it's usually filled with inane chatter and ignorance.
So what are we left with? It rather reminds me of a movie with a damn good trailer, who can't actually live up to what it promises. The premise, the overall description of the game sounds amazing, and there's definitely a large part of my gamer-self that really wants a game like this to actually exist. But once again SoE has produced something that sounds too good to be true, and unfortunately, is. It appears that whatever magic existed on their team that came up with the original SWG has long gone; leaving them to deliver a game that fails to deliver what it promises, and instead gives us unremarkable action framed in graphics that are beneath the modern standards of any studio their size. Sorry.