Pathfinder 2e - How does it compare to other systems?

[Serafina]

If you liked D&D 4E you'll likely enjoy PF 2E.
All the rules content is available for free on the Archives of Nethys (it lags behind a few months with the newest releases, but is well maintained).

It obviously has solid combat - notably the 3-action economy putting a premium on certain actions and movement. You have to consider whether you want to make an additional attack or instead intimidate an enemy, or instead reposition yourself, and that's before you get into spells or feats that take up multiple actions.
It's system for critical success and failures is also pretty neat - it doesn't depend solely on lucky rolls (nat 20s/1s) but instead of beating/missing a target number by 10. So it's more of a reward for being good at a task, and the game reflects that - a critical success on a saving throw typically evades damage entirely, for example.
Bonuses come in three types - circumstance, status (=magical) and item. You apply the strongest of each type, that's it, it nicely reduces bookkeeping IME.

It does have an exploration system. A lot of actions are tagged exploration, denoting that they're actions you take while exploring and that modify how you go about it.
Whether that is what you are looking for, I can't tell you, but you should be able to decide on that for yourself.

Investigation is something that lives in several rule sections. Some of it happens during encounters (especially social encounters), some of it happens during exploration, and some of it happens during Downtime (e.g. using Underworld Lore to find out where a stolen item ended up, one of the given examples).

Personally, I quite like building characters in Patfhinder 2E.
You get plenty of options, particularly once you take Archetypes (which is also where multiclassing lives, it's similar to 4E) into account. Options are however much more balanced against each other than in other editions - particularly in terms of numbers.
You may be familiar with the addage that if one option is way stronger than the other, there really are no options. I run into this issue way less often with PF2E than with other D&D-adjacent games.
I quite enjoy min-maxing, and it's still something I can do in PF2E - it's just the version where I make a character good at specific things, rather than making them overwhelmingly strong.


So yeah, that's a recommend from me.