Okay, but definitely not as good as the first game.
First thing you should all know: Choosing your race and origin is out. You play exclusively as a human who's last name is Hawke. The game lets you pick your first name and gender and also lets you customize your character's face like you could in Origins. You can also import your Origins save to bring some changes to dialogue and characters in the world, depending on what you did in the first game. If you didn't play the first game, then you can pick one of three preset endings that occurred. Your character also has a voice, but I'll let the readers decide on whether that is a good or a bad thing. If you want my opinion, I see it more as a bad thing simply because the disk space used for the protagonist's voice could have been used for better things, plus the dialogue is one of the main things that really feels dumbed down.
If you found the first game's combat a bit boring, then you might be pleased to know that Dragon Age II's combat is much faster paced. The change I noticed most was that Mages tend to be a bit more useful in fights - especially in close quarters combat, which gives me more incentive to use them (for me, they felt really underpowered in Origins). Everything else I wasn't a big fan of. There is now a cool down period for potions, which I see as a failed attempt at making the game more challenging. Instead, it makes things rather annoying because rather than use a health potion when you actually need one, you instead have to run around in circles like an idiot, dodging enemy attacks until you can actually use a potion again. Enemies will also keep spawning in the middle of a fight, which doesn't exactly help and I'd rather that didn't happen, to be honest.
The story was okay, I guess. It is quite a long game when compared to a lot of other games out there on the market these days and for me, it had quite a lot of replayability. When playing through it however, I couldn't help but notice that everything happened so fast - the whole thing felt so rushed. In my opinion, too many things were happening at once in the story, it tries to get you to focus on the whole Mages and Templars at odds thing, but at the same time there are other big things happening that your character must deal with. In Origins, you did a variety of different things but the main goal was clear from the start - stop the Blight. In Dragon Age II, it just feels rather confusing at times.
The graphics have improved from Origins but why Bioware needed to make visual changes to characters such as Flemeth and the Qunari is beyond me. The Darkspawn changes didn't exactly look impressive to me either. I'm sure Bioware meant well in making these changes, but they should learn not to do such things simply because they think it'll make them "look cooler". The game also recycles the same dungeon over and over again. You'd be lucky to get a change in certain passages.
Achievements for anyone who cares about such things can be a nuisance sometimes. Some achievements require you to collect things, which disappear over each act. So basically if you miss one thing, you'll have to play the whole game all over again just to get that one thing you missed for an achievement you wanted. Most you'll earn by playing through the story as you normally would, however. Still, if you want to be careful not to miss certain achievements, I'd have a walkthough nearby just in case.
Dragon Age II should have had a year longer at least in development, I really think that it could have helped the game a lot. Overall it does feel a bit rushed, but if you see it for a cheap price, then I'd advise that you get it because some of the fans do take things out of proportion a bit when they talk about this game. It's not all that bad despite all of the bad things I noted in this review, it's just disappointing when compared to Origins.