I played a few rounds yesterday. More positives than negatives, but it's not completely glowing praise...
At the moment it seems to be a bit more than just the 1st game with a touch of paint, but equally I'm unsure how much different it will feel after a few sessions. I guess it all depends on how many maps there are, and how varied they feel/play. Hopefully it doesn't turn into a repeated grinding of only 1 or 2 maps, almost how the 1st game became.
1st reaction - oo, this is nice, we're not in a cave/tunnel... lol
initially seemed harder than the 1st and then after 1 round we seemed to clear both levels with 3 tombs (admittedly only on normal). Not found the grimoire pickups yet tho.
The loot/drops seem to work a bit better, but we will have to wait and see how the higher-tier drops work. Also, I can't see a need for the forge if you can use everything through the crafting tab in the inventory.
Shame there's no new characters, but the new sub-classes/careers should bring some variety. For a 4 player co-op game, the choice of 5 characters seems annoyingly limited, especially when you can't have duplicates in the group - as there's many times that your preferred character is already taken, which adds frustration and forces you to play an alt that you're possibly not in the mood to use. Adding just 1 or 2 more characters would help alleviate this.
Some of the fire weapons seem OP at the moment - I had 1 round with a mate using the mage and they were laughing that their new staff they had was OP, and that was right after another mate was laughing their dwarf flamethrower was silly OP too... First I tried the witch-hunter who just seemed a bit meh in comparison (especially as he seems to require everyone to spam T all the time to tag/ping specials for his damage perk), and then I tried the elf, who was far more fun (and the health regen is welcome when carrying a tomb), but I never had "this is so ace, it's almost OP and almost needs a nerf!" moments like the mage and dwarf players seemed to get.
It also seems quite buggy, with a few of us getting sound bugs (suddenly losing nearly all sound) and/or dropped to desktop at times. Given it's only a few weeks 'til launch, it's a little worrying...
At least it's only £20, which seems a fair price - especially when many new games now seem to be over £30...