I want to preface this by saying that at the time of this review, I have not yet completed the main storyline. However, I have done everything except enter the final bunker.

First of all, I really enjoy this game. This will be a review focusing on the negative mostly, but I want people to know right off the bat that for what this game is, it's fantastic in many ways.

The World And Items
This game's map is roughly four times larger than the previous game's map, however, for how large it is, there isn't that much of a scale in excitement. The game, rather than a fairly deep pond like the previous game, is more like an extremely vast lake that turns out to only be a few meters deep at most. There are several things that, if this were the previous game, would have been exciting, but in this game, it just doesn't seem to stick the landing. In the previous game, many of the caves were connected if you had the right equipment to traverse them. It was like an entire second map under the above ground map. It was intricate with unique encounters and unique environments. In this game, the caves aren't even mapped because they're all so linear. The caves aren't a second world, they're like hidden levels that you go through in a linear fashion, collecting loot on the way, until you get the main loot at the end and find an unmarked exit you can't use to enter the end of the cave conveniently in most cases. Also, Cannibal camps are smaller and less menacing, just a place with loot and a single group of cannibals. In the previous game cannibal camps were large and rather infrequent considering the size of the map, and when you entered one, you felt that you should do whatever you were there to do quickly, and then leave (At least for the ones in the actual forest, the water front villages had nothing going on). This introduces another problem.

Scaling
The game barely scales. In the first game, you would start out encountering dirty gremlin cannibals, before moving on to the more cleaned up and sophisticated pink skinned ones, and then reaching the blue skinned cannibals. In this game, if you don't get a safe area put up immediately, the chances of you dying to almost any cannibal encounter is quite high, except for the feral ones that leave you alone mostly. The scaling in this game is based more on the cannibals suddenly and inconsistently having armour. This is a meh way of scaling to be honest. Your armour and health gets better as the game progresses, while you unlock new weapons and do more damage with higher strength, on the other hand, the normal cannibals never get stronger besides their new armour. Because of this, once you reach a late stage in the game, you can even end a lot of encounters in a single attack if they happen to have a single limb that didn't randomly generate with a piece of armour on it and you manage to target it. This takes the cannibals to insanely difficult on first encounter, especially in a first play through, to trivial by the end of the game, with no in depth scaling. In the previous game, even when I was in the end game I would fear mutants and be extremely cautious, but that doesn't apply here.

The Crafting
The crafting, I feel, has been rather gutted. Half of this is because of the amount of items exist as uncraftable finds in the world, especially basically all the weapons, and the other half is because of how common loot it in this game. Sorry I keep referencing it, but in the previous game, when you began a world you would have to make difficult decisions of what you would want to use a rare crafting ingredient on. Will this rope be for a crafted bow? A crafted axe? Will you save it for making a pouch? Armour? Now that isn't a decision you have to make because rope is everywhere. Another downgrade is the lack of pouches. You begin every game with a large inventory space that never gets upgraded. It completely wipes out the satisfaction of progression associated with the crafting system and inventory that existed in the first game, this was a huge loss for me. When it comes to the uncraftable finds, what I mean is that there is basically no craftable weapons worth using in this game. The game literally points out where to find a pistol as soon as you start, not to mention the modern axe, stun gun, and shovel that leads to the shotgun isn't too far behind the pistol either. There's no upgraded spear, and the basic spears (while they have longer reach) do so little damage that you'll probably take less damage finishing a fight quicker while taking close combat hits than you would trying to drag out a fight from a distance with spear melee. The crafted bow is immediately replaceable by the pistol, and then more or less soon after it is replaced by the crossbow. Creepy armour is everywhere and lizards are gone, so now the most basic armour is so easy to make that it will boggle your mind. There's no reason to not be wearing a set with a full set as backup of leaf armour by the end of the first day if you know where to get some cloth. Anyway, you get the idea.

Building
The building is both much better in some areas, and much worse in others. In terms of free building, yeah it's great to just be able to place things without figuring out a complicated free building system like in the first game. However, I really miss the templates. While it's not a big deal in the long run, the animations associated with building material are a lot more cumbersome in this game. The template building system allowed you to spam a button to instantly place materials where you wanted them without going through a grunting place animation every time. Same with transportation, you used to just immediately place a log in a log sled, now you have to press G to make sure there's no item in your hand by default in order to skip the animation of you taking out your equipped item before you can pickup more logs. I love the improvements to the free building system, but in my opinion nearly everything else has taken a bit of a blow in turn, from material transportation and placement, to the template builds that still exist in the game.

The Story
I'm sorry, was I the only one that thought I was gonna be Timmy? The end credit scene in The Forest's true ending seemed to suggest so, and so did the name of this game? Like, Sons of the Forest? Isn't that the perfect name to be the son of the main character of the first game? Imagine, still afflicted by the mutations you received at the end of the first game, you get yourself employed as an armed guard for a company that bought another island you believe houses more answers on how you can fix your condition. However, as you arrive, you find yourself in a horrible accident when your helicopter is attacked and crashes into the island. Lucky, your father survived a similar situation on the previous island, and he taught you how to survive in the wilderness. Using the knowledge your father taught you on how to survive and thrive in the wilderness, as well as your research on mutants and cannibals from the previous site in order to get a better understanding of your own condition, you fight your way through the wilderness in an attempt to save your own life before you mutate into a monster yourself.
That's the idea I had at least. Instead we (spoilers) play a mostly uninvolved reporter named Jack Holt, who, unlike the previous game, never has a reasonable explanation on how he can so adeptly survive in the wilderness, nor does he have a real motivation to get to the bottom of everything, except his "journalistic integrity and instinct" I guess. Some papers in the game suggest you were brought there as a fail safe set in place by the billionaire who owned the island in case anything happened to him, as someone he trusted he wanted you to save his daughter, but Virginia has nothing to do with the story as far as I've gotten, and for some reason Timmy and Eric are there sucking at fighting mutants and cannibals.