Some fun to be found, but very inferior to DA:O, and even hurts your experience by ignoring what you did in the previous
Here's the hard thing when trying to decide what you think about DA2 - the game has ups and downs, and each person will give different values to each. I'll present my personal experience.
DA 2 starts slow. The narrative of choice, a story being told and you living the stuff knowing it's past, while passable, was not a great idea. It makes the whole game feel like an Origin (yeah, from DA:O) instead a grand adventure. Of course, the lack of a more relevant main quest adds to the feel.
After some days, it feels almost like a MMORPG. It's long, you don't see it ending that soon, but it's confortable to know you can return to your champion shoes. There's a little too much repetition of scenarios and quest objectives tough.
On the gameplay side, things are bittersweet. Classes are better balanced now, warriors and specially rogues are not crap anymore, and the active control of a melee character is much more interesting.
When you try to control the group tactically, on the other hand, things are worst. You can no longer zoom out until the view become isometric and even if you could it would not make that much of a differente - in EVERY encounter more adds simply appear from the thin air. It looks stupid and make the fight much more chaotic.
My guess is - they made things that way so they could "kinda" balance real time action play with pause and order tactical play. It doesn't work. It removes part of the fun from trying to play tactical but it's still vastly superior.
Of course, reading this you might believe I hated the combat. Not true. But what's good about it was already in DA:O (minus the fun playing it as an action game - again, not the way I like to play DA). To be fair, the cross class combo system is an improvement over the spell combos in DA:O, but it would take too much space to explain here, if you're interested look it up on the official forum.
On the new artistic approach, I think the change is positive, but the lack of better technical support make is matter much less than it should. Without the high rez package (and playing in DX9 overal) the game looks OLD, much worst that Origins. No artistic style can change it. playing on DX11 very high with the package the game looks OK, slightly better than Origins, except some spell effects from Origins were better (like Firestorm and Storm of the Century).
Now, here comes the deal breaker for me - they IGNORE many of the choices you make in your DA:O save (Lelianna RETURNS even if you killed her, same for Zevran). Also, no choice you make on DA2 matter at all. If you choose to defend the mages, you'll still kill the first enchanter. If you align with the templars, you'll still kill the templar "boss" and the mages will still leave the circle and start a revolution. It's even the same ENDING bar the first 10 seconds of voice over.
Some numbers to make it look official:
Graphics: 7.0 (with DX11 and high rez package, otherwise 5.0)
Sound: 8:0 (competent voice acting but nothing outstanding)
Gameplay: 6.5 (why remove stuff fans like? And spawning adds WTF)
Immersion: 2.5 (7.0 untill you notice they IGNORE what your Warden did in DA:O)
Longevity: 5.0 (the game is HUGE is you do all side quests, but most are boring)
Replayability: 3.0 (story-wise) or 7.0 (if you're a build nutjob like me)
Average: 5.0
A so-so game.