Man, I sure am taking my time with this. I'm at 13 hours and only at mission 6. This game is so dense haha.
Playing mostly stealth, but not afraid to get my hands dirty when necessary. Also, back to low chaos going a little crazy in mission 3. So yay. Possession is an incredibly useful power, god damn.
I think I'll do high chaos with Emily next. She looks like she'll be fun for that.
I'm really not enjoying this. The performance on PS4 (standard) is atrocious, and I'm getting tired of the psychic AI (especially the civilians). Maybe it's because the first real level is in broad daylight, but enemies seem to be spotting me and going on instant alert from all the way across the map. Combined with the swimmy controls and long load and pause times (seriously what is the deal with the laggy menus in this game) I'm getting incredibly frustrated.
Started playing on Hard because I really liked the first game, but I might have to drop it down to power through.
I felt the same way for the first 3 or so levels. It's really hard to not get spotted in this game, the guards have more vision and awareness than what I'm used to in stealth games. That, and at the beginning of the game you have very limited options for dealing with enemies nonlethally. In addition to the fact that the first couple stages are just loaded with guards grouped together so thy literally all see you. So you are basically reloading every 30-60 second, which sucks. Hard is not the way to go, imo. I'm playing on normal and it's still quite a challenge.
Luckily, the game eases up on this a bit. Also, you kind of get used to how damn good guards are at noticing you and you figure out the optimal way of going. The level design becomes more corridor-y later. Yes, there are still plenty of open spaces, but it opens up vertically as well as long as you use your blink/far reach well. I'm enjoying it quite a bit now, started to be the case on about mission 3. I agree with you that the first couple missions are not ideal and can get frustrating, especially considering your limited powerset. One thing I do not like, especially on the early levels, is the amount of collectibles you need to acquire to upgrade your powers, but you don't have enough powers to effectively stealth your way to those collectibles. Kind of a catch-22 that becomes rather trial-and-error.
Anyway, hope that helps fwiw. It does get better and I am really, really enjoying myself now after being in a similar situation to you in the first few stages. I think around mission 3 or 4 it all started clicking and I was having a good time.