Dragon Age: Origins, it is not.
First off and most egregious, DA2 has no distinct narrative. None. It is simply a collection of loosely held together quests that send you all over Kirkwall and the surrounding area. There is no goal. No over arching theme. No imminent or looming danger. No great obstacle to overcome. Nothing. That baffles me. I can't recall an RPG that took this route and I can see why. I could not have cared less about almost anything I did in the game since there was nothing holding this or that quest together. To whit: Sure I'll go save that mage from the templers and then I will go kill that beast, then I will go fight some random raiders, then I will head to the Deep Roads for some Darkspawn killing and then I will go do something else equally "random" that has little to no meaning with respect to developing the story. When compared to DA:O whose story was so complex and compelling, this was an utter letdown.
The companion NPCs who you gather in DA2 are mere shadows to those from DA:O which were interesting, funny, fully developed and full of life. Here is a run-down reaction you will get from all of the NPCs in every situation in DA2 (those whom I recruited):
Fenris: I HATE MAGES! GRRRR! THEY CANNOT BE TRUSTED! EVER!
Isabella: I have slept with everyone. I am a pirate. I am a mediocre romance version of Morrigan.
Varric: I tell tall tales and make lame jokes.
Merrill: I am naieve.
Bethany (who I kind of liked): Not all mages aren't evil.
Anders: The Templars are out to get me. I can't control myself!
Avaline: /snooze ... I'm sorry did she ever say aything interesting?
This is problematic because I didn't care at all what happened to them or what they decided to do or say next. When some of them split near the end of the game, I didn't care at all because I never developed any sort of connection with them anyway. Oh look, I just gained rivalry points because I went against that NPCs completely inflexible moral backbone. Oh look, I just gained friendship points because I did or said something that fell right in line with that NPCs moral backbone. There is nothing nuanced about any reaction any companion has at any point in the game. They are caraicatures of NPCs, if that is possible.
I understand that Bioware was trying to shift the focus away from the NPCs and more to your character (Hawke) but even he wasn't that interesting. As everyone knows by now Bioware went the Mass Effect route with respect to bringing a voice to the main character and a similar dialogue system into DA2. You can be nice, crack a "joke", be "mean" or if you wish, choose to romance someone. The problem is I quickly realized that it hardly mattered what you chose. And the mean responses are down right pathetic. When staring down a group of raiders who are, well who cares what they're up to as they don't have any impact on the story ... your "mean" response is to say something like "I don't want this to come to violence. But I will fight you if I have too". Did you get goosebumps? Yeah, no one else did either.
Furthermore you are pigeonholed into playing as a human. Certainly this is because providing voices for multiple races is probably prohibitive in several ways. Yes you can customize the character's facial features to a reasonable extent, but not having the option to play the game as a different race and experience NPC reactions to you based on that (as was done so excellently in DA:O) just diminished that RPG aspect.
Why are we restricted to Kirkwall and the surrounding area? DA:O was a universe of exploration compared to this. Note to Bioware: Simply having me enter in a different direction in the same dungeon, mine or whatever still doesn't change the fact that it's the SAME LAYOUT I have been in three times before. Again this a pale immiation to the vareity of regions you get to explore in DA:O, all of which were unique in their own way. Yes once you saw one Darkspawn tunnel they all kind of looked the same, but at least when I went to find Andraste's Ashes (for example), that dungeon wasn't the same tunnels from the other direction! And Kirkwall, while sprawling, got really old about half way through Act 2. Been there, done that. Three or four times in fact. What was the point again?
The combat is much more interactive, flowing and energetic, but it is SO easy. There is no doubt that if you are looking for any kind of challenge close to that which you had experienced in DA:O, play it on hard. On normal the game offers no challenge at all.
Other things that were changed that make no sense, herbalism and alchemy have been all but removed. You simply find resources then order the item you want for a small fee. Say what? I can't even fathom an explanation for this change. The same change was made for runecrafting as well, but since it was such a complete mess in Awakenings I was less bothered by it for that profession. You cannot customize your companion's appearance in any way (for the most part), instead you can find addons to their respective outfits that improve on them in some way or another. While this makes managing your inventory really easy, it ... well, that's all it does actually. I can't really see how this is beneficial to RPG gameplay. Gifts have been reduced from learning the desires of your NPCs from speaking to them and finding out what they feel and believe, to simply finding an item and having the game happily tell you, "Hey, So-and-so may really like this! You should give it to them". The game tells me that I should speak to my companions often in their home base (if you will) but they never really had anything that interesting to say so what was the point?
Questing has been greatly streamlined by having arrows pointing at the various locations as to where you need to go and who you need to speak too. This is good and bad. It's good because it's well nigh impossible to not know where to go next, but when everything is handed to me on a silver platter it reduces questing to errand running. Certainly having no direction (*cough* Witcher *cough*) is equally ruiness but striking a balance between pointing me in the right direction and simply saying IT'S RIGHT HERE must be found. And some of the quests were downright insipid. Did I really just do a quest where I watched a woman fumble about in her attempts to tell some other random NPC she had feelings for them?! Yes, yes I did. And man was that just awful. Another small irritant (and this follows from DA:O): Stop putting in locked chests that the rogues in my group cannot open!! GAH!
I say I had mixed reactions to this game because there were some positives, but they are greatly overshadowed by the sheer number of bizzare changes that were made in almost every aspect of the game. Some people suggest (others outright say) that these gameplay changes were made because Bioware decided to release the game to consoles as well as PCs and a dumbing down of the game was a result. If true, I can only hope that if DA:3 is a cross platform release, that this trend to meeting the lowest common demoniator will not reduce this series to mediocrity.