Not as good as its predecessor, but not as bad as some make it be either.
After the not-so-promising start screen, things picked up. The story is narrated through the cutscenes by one of your companions, several years after the events described took place. It felt like a nice change to the usual storytelling. Also, Bioware FINALLY took steps (started with ME2) to break away from the "intro-> 3-5 places to visit-> an obligatory if interesting twist-> grand finale" formula. Still, the ending was a bit disappointing. I won't spoil, so let's just say that I tolerated the oversized Terminator from ME2, but THIS I will not.
This sort of thing continued throughout the game. The new characters were interesting (if not so memorable as those in DA:O), and then they give me a Final Fantasy reject (thank you, Bioware, though, for letting me get rid of him in an interesting fashion). Anders seemed like one of the best companions ever made by Bioware, plus he was one of the best love interests for female gamers too, and then they mess him up. Your character is voice-acted this time (thank God, Fem-Hawke is NOT voiced by Jennifer Hale), and the conversation wheel from the Mass Effect series is back. I miss the good old dialogue tree, but at least icons that indicate what each response will be like were added, and they help with selecting what to say.
The graphics were better than the first game (I hated how the Mud Kingdom, pardon, Ferelden looked like),with a more vibrant color palette, and overall better design, but the interior locations were recycled to the extreme, much worse than ME1 could ever dream of.
The combat system is at its core very similar to the first game. There are still skills and spells with cooldowns, combined with the "real time with pause" system. However, the pace of combat is much faster, and there's much more gore, graphically. Also, mages don't damage party members with AoE spells anymore, unless you're playing on the hardest difficulty setting. Although much of the tactical feel was lost, there is something very satisfying about hacking and slashing wave after wave of enemies in this fashion.
The three classes are still there, but you can only be human this time. The general skills are gone, but the class specific skill trees are better than those in the previous game. I liked how the skills are grouped, it gave me better control while fine-tuning my character.
In the end, I enjoyed playing the game, despite its many shortcomings, so here's a nice 7.0. Still, I can't shake the feeling that writing a positive review for this game on PC is writing an obituary for RPGs on PC, or even worse for PC gaming in general.