I actually just played the game for the first time and lost interest again after about 15 hours, though the quests and exploring the first island was fun.
But there was quite a bit which...I didn't like: The turn based mode felt wonky and unpolished. Some abilities don't seem to make a whole lot of sense now. The AI seemed to have problems, aggroing enemies from far away seems to be an issue. But in general the turnbased combat just doesn't feel good. It feels like what it is: An afterthought.
But what I also didn't like is the story. I am not a fan of all this "dining with goods" thing in general. Hated the start of Divinity OS 1, where you are in a weird dimension and you are shown "the nothing" which you should fight now. POE2 pretty much geos the same round. Tells you all kind of weird abstract stuff at the beginning where you have no idea about. After doing the prologue section the first time, I watched the ending of my lets play of the first game (which storywise I didn't like for the last third or so) just to have a rought idea about the feverdreams called story in this game.
Man...I really like to just be an adventure, doing "real adventures" in the world instead of chasing gods.
Why can't other games go with the same as Blade of Destiny did: "You do not know any of this, when your ship reaches Thorwal harbor. You are dreaming of adventure, of the big city, of hearing your names proclaimed by the skalds and bards in all corners of the word..."
And not "Hey man, you are the chosen one, go hunt some gods and save the universe! Everything depends on you!"
The other thing which makes POE2 really unattractive is how much it is frontloaded with game mechanics.
In most games you can just learn "as you go". And while you can reskill in POE2 there are decisions about your class, subclass, multiclass which you cannot reverse. The game just hammers you with tons of minor mechanics right at character creation and to just get a glimpse of what you are actually doing you need to read up on external wikis and such. You have no idea what all of this crap means. While all the tooltips help, it's just a lot to take in. Would be ok in an MMO maybe where you then focus on your character, but once you finished you think like "oh crap...now I need to learn all other classes as well as soon as they join".
Don't get me wrong. I like lots of coices, and a deep character system. But I think ideally the game should start slow and easy and then build up in terms of game mechanics.
This wasn't an issue back then (mostly), when systems where extremely easy as in Eye of the Beholder, Dark Sun or even Baldurs Gate, where your choices are rather limited or you might even be familiar with the system before starting the game. Character creation in Realms of Arcania was annoying as well, but for completely different reasons (you had terrible dice rolls instead of terrible decisions).
Adding Subclasses and Multiclasses into the game certainly did not make the game easier to understand and get into.
It might be a nice thing later on, once you learnt the game. But imho it makes a terrible start.