By all accounts I think that this was probably a sequel that really should not have come about.
The humour that had been used in the first of the series was all but used up, so trying to squeeze another title out of it was never going to happen. This compounded by a significant dumbing down of the game mechanics and a shrinking of the game world led to ultimately to the less than perfect final result.
Perhaps we were all just a little burnt out from the epic SRS project.