This review is for the most part spoiler-free, there is *one* spoiler tag however.

Introduction
I'll try and keep this brief. I've finished the entirety of the singleplayer and every "low-rank" scout missions. I'd say roughly 2 hours were spent in character creation and quite a few trying to max out friendship with many characters, so I'd say roughly 40 hours is a good indicator for average playtime.

The long and short of it though, don't get this game if you're in for the Multiplayer only, especially with friends, it has quite a few flaws compared to even the first one. However, if you're in for the titan-slaying action and a good single-player experience, by all means, do buy it, it's excellent.

Rough Review
Let me get this out of the way, first. I'm incredibly biased. I played through the first game of the series too and loved every minute of it, sure, it grew stale after a while, but rushing through the scout missions with a friend was just a top-notch action experience all the way through.

Since none of my friends bought this game at launch, I played through the singleplayer first and boy what an experience that was. It covers the entirety of [Season 1] and [Season 2], but allows you to create your own character through a fairly expansive character creation (however, most of the hairstyles are from characters of the show) and you get to see the story from a different angle than usual. While you followed the footsteps of the main characters in the first game, you yourself will be the center of the action this time around. Like many, I was a bit skeptical about having to replay the same old plot in the sequel, but it turns out that they changed it up just enough to make it interesting again. Viewing the already fairly different missions from a completely different perspective makes it seem like a fresh experience almost.

But for the sake of keeping this short, there isn't much to say about the singleplayer other than it's excellent. The story is told in an entertaining manner, kept me hooked for most of it and the daily life segment is a great addition, where you can learn skills from your fellow cadets or even superiors to learn new skills to power up your own character.

Let's dive straight into the worse parts of the game now. The multiplayer is... alright. This time around, you can't enter a hub with your friends, you can only create "mini-lobbies" that last 3 minutes at best before they auto-start and after the mission's completed, you're all separated again, which ruins the flow by fair bit already, but I digress. I suppose these changes were made to make matchmaking a bigger focus this time around, but of course, there's nothing going on online. Couldn't find a single room through quick matchmaking both in PvP and PvE. My only experience from multiplayer comes from a few matches with a friend after I've finished the main campaign, and oh boy did they mess it up.

There's a big problem with synchronisation in this game. It's not so much that it's badly done, it just seems like they went more for an individual approach this time around, most likely to make PvP with up to 8 players a feasible endeavor and it shows. In fact, it's terrible for everyone else and here's why. You can sum up everything that is actually synched in a few words. Titan health, Titan kills & mission completion as well as other players zooming around (read: teleporting around). This doesn't sound too bad at first, but it shows when fighting aberrants, where the "armor" gauge (stamina) they have doesn't deplete for everyone, but on an individual basis, making it several 1v1 fights, rather than a team effort. Even worse, but don't necessarily take my word on this one, my friend got grabbed by the titan and I didn't even know. I was right there, but nothing showed up, although that might've been a slight hiccup. As far as teammates are concerned, everyone gets their own copy this time, which is really odd when multiple people can spam decisive battle signals, special cooperative maneuvers and titan transformations.

I'll leave it at this for now, if the game's ever updated to address some issues, I'll also update this review, but judging from the track record of the first one (it still has voice chat that can't be turned off and NO controller deadzone, which this game also doesn't have) we most likely won't see any major ones.

TL;DR: As opposed to the first one, the singleplayer in this is much better than its multiplayer portion. Matchmaking doesn't seem to work at all and playing with friends is pretty much the same as playing alone.