Fun! Great story/characters, but don't expect it to be what DAO was.
Nearly all of the reviews compare it to the original Dragon Age. Fair enough, since it is called Dragon Age II. My take is that I got bored with Dragon Age Origins: the micromanagement, the uninspired combat skill rotation (not to mention throw-away animations), the drawn-out conversations in which the player character had no voice, and the predictable and incongruous story (Let's see, our land is being invaded, so let's save the world by running around doing irrelevant side quests and establishing romances with people we pick up on the road. Huh?)
The things that annoyed me in the original game have been fixed in DA2, for the most part. Combat is MUCH more lively. The animations are fun, the pace is exciting, the characters are intriguing, and the skills your various characters can uniquely develop are really interesting to play around with-better than in any other game I can think of. Combat is not perfect, but mostly fun. (The combat is more like Mass Effect than DAO).
But the two really big things that make this game work for me are the story and the characterization. I totally enjoyed not knowing where this story was going to go from early on (unlike DAO). I found the side quests appropriate and worth doing. I admired the main character enough to care about what was going to happen to him/her. The characters themselves are quite well done, especially the character expressions and animations which help make the story come alive. However, unfortunately Bioware could not resist giving us one character suffering the tired old cliché of having lost his memory, though it didn't have much game impact.
Okay, there are some problems. There's too many noticeable bugs. I'm not sure how you can already be selling DLC's when you haven't fixed the original game. Graphics are pretty good, yet environments are reused FAR too often, the worst problem in the game. Forget about having any fun with exploration.
The combat certainly needed more time in development, causing you to wonder if anyone play tested this game. Personally, I don't like to pause every 2 seconds to issue commands and micromanage, so I had fun on normal difficulty setting without pausing (made things fast and furious). Normal setting is too easy if you do like to pause and micromanage the party. But playing like you used to play other RPG's, where you'd pause, issue a command for each character, and repeat, doesn't seem to work as it should, especially on harder difficulties. Most of the time your characters will not carry out the command you give them. They will be interrupted or something, and "forget" your command. The solution, for me, is not to play this like we used to play those old RPG's, and play this as more of an action game. You really need to spend time setting up your pre-programmed behaviors for each character, and then go with it. There's still tactical challenge, especially on harder difficulty settings. Play the demo first and see if you like it. Not everyone likes action RPG's (but if you didn't like the demo why would you buy it anyway???)
I wish they could come up with something more realistic than enemies popping up out of the ground or dropping from the sky. Combat voices of characters quickly get annoying. I wanted to spend time playing with Merrill's character, but could not stand her repetitive comments: "Do you think they're tiring? I'm tiring." Yes you are! SHUT UP!!!!
The game does suffer in a number of ways from being designed for consoles. Where is my continuous run toggle key? Come on!
The romance options are pretty much irrelevant, as far as I'm concerned. At least here they don't seem as out of place as in the ME series.
After some experimentation with class and gender, I ended up playing the game as a female rogue, since I found that character the most intriguing, and developed her into an assassin. The female voice was well acted--I can't really speak for the male. I used the preset character model after a little bit of experimentation, because I figured out that Hawke was a preset character already, and it made sense to go with what the developers had figured out the character should look like. I'm glad I did.
I played on Windows XP, so did not experience any DX11 issues. The game did not crash once. I finished the game in 64 hours, occasionally frustrated with combat, but mostly immersed in the story and eager to find out what was going to happen next into the late hours of the night.