I think it's still missing the story and atmosphere to match the original game but I'm still absolutely loving it. The level design is some of the best that I've seen from any fps game period
I think the story in the first game is overly convoluted, but the first game was designed to represent a lot more of everything. Both sequels are much more focused narratives. This one is clearly bridging HR with DE so that's a win in my book. You can see where it's fitting in.
The atmosphere...I mean it's very different, the mechanical apartheid etc feel very real. I thought they did a great job of bringing a sense of oppression to the game. I'm not a minority irl, I've never experienced that, and I think it would be silly to say a game about cyborgs is the best place to tackle those issues, but I felt like it got it 'right' from an outsider perspective - the random police searches are actually super infrequent, but just often enough to make me feel pissed at them for doing it (even if some of them aren't even all that mean while doing it, it's still demeaning),similarly there was a time I took the non-aug train on accident coming back from a mission, and the immediate "WHAT ARE YOU DOING" kind of response when I got off was jarring and shocking. Even when you don't have to, I found myself sticking to the 'aug only' sides of the trains and stations and other areas, just to avoid dealing with the cops. The fact that you can get this sense of degradation without the game really beating you over the head with it (Like, yeah it's always present, so thematically you see it all the time, but mechanically it's not like you literally cannot walk down the street without being stopped, quite the opposite) is impressive to me. For me that's a win, they don't have to resort to shock value in any way, there's no 'real' slur being used, it's not about color of skin or gender or anything, but it still feels oppressive in a real way to me.
The variety in the architecture really helps keep it from being stale even in samey environments too, the Palisades feels NOTHING like Golem City, for example. or even the red light district. This reduces the sting of having less areas to visit compared to the previous games. In those games ALL of HengSha basically looked the same, or ALL of New York, Detroit, etc. You only have Prague (and mission areas etc) here, but the distinct zones and buildings feel quite different to me.