Yeah I wouldn't get this game yet if at all. It was planned for a full release this year, but then they switched it to early access only a month or so ago to "polish" it but it's missing more than just polish.
The game is very pretty and the skies look a lot better than the first game. The changing seasons add variety to the visuals. This is the best thing about the game.
They made the map a lot bigger but filled it with very little. I explored three caves and only one of them was large like they were in the first game. You pretty much have to use the GPS to find anything interesting because the map is largely empty, so that kills exploration. None of the POIs I discovered were remotely as interesting as the giant sinkhole with the mysterious door and the big cannibal village in the first game.
Melee combat doesn't seem much different than from the first game so it still feels like button mashing. Throwing objects like explosives seems a bit easier, though molotovs don't seem to do the kind of damage that they did in the first game so you will want grenades and time bombs for sure. You can still chop the bodies into parts but there are no effigies in the game yet so unless you want to eat them it's best to turn them into bones.
However, the bone armor kind of sucks. The enemies hit a lot harder even on normal difficulty so they tore through it like toilet paper. The creepy armor is slightly better and there is a new tech armor type that I didn't discover, but it doesn't seem worth crafting the early armors.
New mutant designs look cool but their behavior seems wonky at times. Sometimes they'll be really aggressive and charge at you and sometimes they'll bumble about like you're not there. In the caves it's usually best to run past them if you can because they aren't smart or fast enough to get you and some of them can tank a lot of damage. The Virginias in the first game seemed a lot more dangerous since they were harder to get away from. In the overworld, there are different types of cannibals and some of them are pretty strong so the overworld enemies showed the most improvement.
The building system is a mixed bag. Simple structures like protected fire pits are easy to understand and cool to build, but you have to play around with the system to figure out how to build bigger structures. Sometimes the extra things you can do to placed logs like sharpen the top into points for the defensive wall don't work, and there are no lockable doors and gates available yet so it's pointless to build a defensive base unless you're going for an open base with a trap corridor like in Rimworld. The game is currently missing several blueprints from the first one like all the boats, the effigies, some traps and some furniture, but there are plans to add more stuff in the future.
The water physics is odd which is probably why they didn't add the boats at launch. If a log plops into a body of water sometimes it launches high into the sky. Also, I never found a single fish to spear or trap in either the rivers or lakes I discovered, so the only way I could get fish is to have the NPC companion gather them.
Dead bodies and objects despawn too quickly. Now, having too many objects did cause some problems in early builds for the first game, but one of the cool things they wanted builders to try in this game was using rivers to transport logs downstream. You can't do that very well at the moment because a bunch will despawn.
Survival mechanics are dumbed down even more than the first game. Infection and sickness isn't present in the game yet (if it ever will be), so you don't have to worry about blood or rotten foods. All of the fresh water is drinkable so you don't have to purify it. The Sanity meter never worked in the first game and now it's gone in this one, which is a shame because I've played some games with interesting sanity mechanics. There appears to be fewer animals. The only aggressive animal I encountered was the shark, though there are supposedly orcas. I don't think there are any crocodiles or boars in this game. Food isn't much of a problem, anyway, since there are so many items to collect in the caves like MREs and canned food, and they will respawn if you reload the game.
I've interacted with two NPCS. You get Kelvin at the start and you control him by writing a command on a notepad and enduring a slow unskippable animation where you pin it to his chest or hand it to him. He's helpful with the drudgery of gathering, but he's not too bright so he will chop down the trees holding any of your treehouses and walk into fire pits all the time. He has trouble crossing larger bodies of water so he has to walk around until he finds a crossing point, though when I moved to an island he magically appeared at my base eventually. I didn't do much with the other NPC because she runs away a lot. I know that you can "tame" her and give her weapons to use but I didn't feel like it.
As for the story, I chose to stop playing the game instead of going through it because I read that large chunks of it are unfinished so you basically get the beginning portions and the end. From what I've gathered from others, the story is pretty crap compared to the first one, and the first game's wasn't as good as I had hoped it would be.
So far, it seems like the devs want to focus more on the multiplayer base building and halfass the other aspects of this game. It's possible that they will add a lot during the early access period, but even the first game feels unfinished in parts and that probably has to do with it being in early access for several years. I don't mind an early access game. I enjoy Project Zomboid and Valheim, for example, but Sons Of The Forest is currently lacking in content and I got bored of it quickly.
