If I wanted to play a combat game, I'd go buy a combat game. PoP is not a combat series, it's supposed to be a puzzle game with combat as a way to break up the puzzles(so important, but not the defining factor of the game).

Hmm, dunno if you can really say what PoP is supposed to be. Seems to me that the developers make that choice. Personally, I liked the enhanced combat. The combat in the first game was pretty half-assed (walk into area, enemies keep spawning in, you use the same move to kill them all repeatedly until they stop respawning, move on). If you are going to include combat at all, it should be good and WW's combat is definitely better than SoT's. As for puzzles, I didn't really notice any significant difference between SoT's and WW's. I did notice that the platforming segments were more challenging in WW, which is a good thing. As for storyline, yeah, I agree that WW had a weak story and an annoying protagonist. But as I said before, I don't really care much for superficial aspects (and storyline is definitely superficial in action platformers) so it didn't bother me too much.