There's combat in this one? So it's sort of like X-COM but with cops? I might look into this (and the previous game which seemed pretty interesting, even without turn-based combat).

Nice. I was looking forward to it.

The blurb says you play the new sheriff, the actual game sicks you having to play the same guy as from the last game so it's wrong and misleading.

>To maintain peace and order, the young sheriff Lilly Reed (Sarah Hamilton, The Longest Journey) will have to team up with fugitive criminal Jack Boyd (Jon St. John, Duke Nukem), and pray that her dangerous plan doesn’t spiral out of control.

Where exactly it says that?

OP of this thread and the GOG news post i.e. the blurb

"Make dramatic decisions and employ questionable methods of law enforcement as the ambitious but mistrusted sheriff Lilly Reed, a young woman trying to keep order in the cold, violent town of Sharpwood. How far can she bend the law before she breaks?"

Okay, just to be clear, who do you play as in this new game? The new character "Lily Reed" as advertised right there in the description, or do you play as the male lead from the previous game? There seems to be conflicting information in this thread here. To add on, a second question if I may, is there a "random map" mode, where you can solve procedurally created cases, separate from the main story?

Ahh, my apologies in that case. Yeah, indeed OP of this thread is misleading, although I believe it's just someone from GoG office "lost in translation".

EDIT: ahh, naw, I just saw your review. Didn't knew that noir and neo-noir are now considered "edgy" and "12yo boy fantasy". Jesus Christ.

@Nicole28 (don't know if such tagging on GoG works?)
OP of this title is misleading, you're playing a character from the first game.
Although to be fair game cut-scenes (which are the main thing for character development here and in the previous game) seems to be focusing on both Nash and Reed. So far I have mixed feelings about it; I understand why they made it that way, but I still think it would be more fun to play as female sheriff in some conservative shithole trying to actually get something done.

Edit2: game files don't indicate the existence of sandbox; in first game there's line in settings:
<SandboxEnabled>true</SandboxEnabled> (it's false until you finish main story)
However there's nothing about sandbox in the same setting file in second game.

Absentmindedcat is right, you play mostly Jack Boyd helping Lilly Reed, so far I've played as her only for one short interrogation. But that means more of gameplay as her could show up later in the game.
There doesn't seem to be any random map mode.

You play Jack from the last game. Lily isn't even a co-lead from the first four hours of playing which is about as far as I think I'll get for all the prologue promises it, as soon as Jack comes into the story its all him.
And if there's a non-story mode, I haven't been able to find it.

Thank you all! It's very kind of you folks to help me out here with my queries!

Okay, few thoughts about three hours in the game.

1. Dialogues are WAYYY TOO SLOOW. "hi... im... i... i'd... i want... i mean...". No. There was so far ONE well-paced scene, in opposite to most of them in the 1st game. Voice acting is well done, annoying at times but in a proper manner - they're annoying because they're supposed to be, not because of bad voice actors.

2. Inventory management is an utter fucking mess. You can't assign items one by one; as soon as you click on next cop and then try to go back to previous one to, let's say, add him pepper spray - his whole inventory disappear, and you have to add everything again.

3. Lack of information about cops behavior making first few days super annoying; as opposed to 1st game, now your cops needs to meet certain number requirement to go to mission (let's say saving kitty requires 100 but attempted murder required 900). Ok, it makes some sense; however, police officers will often refuse to go on assignment with opposite gender/lower skilled opposite gender. You need a female character to go on assignment for murder? "Haha, no, sorry boss, I have to deal with the annoying woman at home, I'll not take them on the mission", ah, gotcha, let's just leave the kid to bleed on the street.

3.5 Why you can't send cops with a lower rating than required with a smaller success rate? "Hey, this mission requires 900 but better send cops of 850 total to MAYBE save a kid instead of sending nobody and letting him die". That would be cool.

4. You have fewer cops than in first game at the same moment and more of them are drunk/doesn't come to work; it's randomly generated on each day, so enjoy succeeding day work or failing it depends on how RNG treated you.

EDIT: I see in patchlog they made some balance changes, so I'm gonna write back with results of those.

EDIT2: Nah, still retarded. Gonna wait few weeks/months until they patch it to make it playable. 13 officers total, you can bring around half to work (as you never know which of them will refuse to work next day, great explanation game); bring 7. One doesn't appear. Two needs to work on detective cases. Two guys and two gals left. Great, we can do this, we just need proper timing, they're well equipped. Oh shit, a mission where I need to bring all four to meet stats requirements.
...
...
...
Oh, they won't work with each other? Too bad, let's not chase a guy who just killed kid because we're acting like 12yo and we don't like opposite gender.

EDIT3: They've released another patch on steam, it's being reviewed by GoG stuff so I'm gonna re-check it after that.

This is just a theory (based on Jack's character arc from the last game), but it seems logical that Lilly's role will become more dominant as time progresses, so I'm reserving judgement until I've played through a good deal more. Just look at the cover - on one side you have Lilly Reed out of uniform and leaning against a cop car as a passive observer, and on the other side you have Lilly Reed super cop.

I think a freeform non-story mode was added to the first game in a later update. Sucks its not here, as the basic gameplay loop has more going on.

Looks like the first game is today's GOG daily deal. I highly recommend playing it before the sequel since it has some relevance to the story.

It's good so far but the RNG of officers taking the day off and a few of the balance options are a bit too hard, especially for the start of the game.