Alright, I have to be honest here, this game looks better than the first, I think the 4x mode might feel better, (If I had ever gotten to it before getting frustrated and quitting) but this game is just nowhere near as fun as station master 1. This one does feel a bit more like a game, but the economy ramping in SM1 felt so much better, coupled with the fact that it was 100% possible, and even a viable strategy, to never prostitute your slaves in SM1, instead pumping their stats and assigning most to milking, and the best ones to jobs that increased profits from the non-sex facilities like the club stuff. In SM2, you just can't make a viable profit off of non sex facilities, you'll maybe make 1000 a month off of each, while in SM1, the facilities were expandable and as such you could make massive amounts of cash off of them. Speaking of expandable facilities, I really miss them in SM2. Sure each floor is basically its own specific facility, but being able to place each small piece of each facility instead of one giant building felt much better to me. The game also looks way to dark for me. I have bad eyes, and even with my glasses, the minimal lighting coupled with the walls and floor being black, plus most buildings being dark meant that everything kind of blended together to me and it was not easy for me to spot details.
All in all, SM2 feels like the frostpunk 2 to SM1's frostpunk 1. The scale is ramped up, the game and UI are prettified, new mechanics are added and old ones refined, but what is lost are the smaller details, the simplicity, and the very soul of what made me enjoy the first game so much. At heart its the same game, but all its made me want to do was go back and play the first one again.