Much as a part of me hates to say it, the game just isn't good, much as I loved it way back when. The biggest issue I'd say is not that it's too big, but too flat. Outside of a handful of choice segments, it's just not a platformer anymore, it's a large scale fetch quest with a ton of similar minigames and awful FPS segments (which may have been fine back in the day, but they've aged terribly and just don't feel good nowadays). The minigames are almost all a variant on "shoot/hit these things, red is one point, green is three, blue is five" (apologies if I mixed up the colors), and they're of varying quality. I'd argue more of the transformations feel like a handicap than a bonus (the washing machine in particular is awful to use). The dragons are at least okay as far as bosses go, but most of the rest are pretty bad, with the one from the circus in particular being incredibly awful. And hell, people say people hate on it for being more of a collectathon... but it's actually less of one, as there's note bundles, so you actually have less things to find in the noticeably larger levels. Most of the moveset added is also more pointless keys than actual expansion of the moves (IE the types of eggs, the "upgraded" drill move, all stuff that just deal with explicate obstacles more than anything else). And the splitting mechanic could be neat... but they lock all the moves so you have to slowly build them up, so it doesn't feel good splitting up till late game, you just feel kind of crippled. And Mumbo... my god. Any time you have to use him it's just sloooooooow excess walking, that if I recall correctly you actually end up having to do more than once in at least one level.
And despite having said all that, I feel like I'm STILL missing some issues my friends and I ran into when playing through the game (we all came away hating it after having loved it as kids). That said, it actually does do better on humor than the first game, and has some great moments in that regard at least. But yeah, it's unfortunately just not a good game, I'd say. If you really want to maybe give it a try and you could get some fun out of it, I'd just say at least don't go in with super high expectations.
