Well I just finished the game, clocked around 40 hours on the character I stuck with and was SL 100 when i beat the last boss, I think the game is largely better than Dark Souls 1 but in some ways worse, I might change my opinion after playing more, I sunk hundreds of hours into the first one after all.

Things I think are better:

- Number of boss battles

- animations and visuals

- less ability to rely on extreme overtanking builds to cheese the game

- replacement for humanity/death mechanics

- World size

- Difficulty, personally I found this game harder than Dark Souls, I know some people think otherwise but trying to play as almost solely dual wielding was challenging.

- Enemy AI, this is leaps and bounds better than the brain dead enemies in Dark Souls

- Multiplayer coop/pvp it seems to work much better and is not a bit more flexible, all round improvement.

- Performance, playing on the Xbox 360 I didn't notice any fps issues like in the original.

Things I think are worse:

- Story (this is subjective and it'll be ages before people piece it together anyway) including the ending.

- World connectivity, what I mean is that the way the world fit together in Dark Souls felt much more natural and well crafted than this game.

- Multiple enemies + bosses in small rooms, the camera wasn't still a piece of shit i'd not have as much complaint here, but some of the encounters while not particularly hard, are frustrating due to the camera.

- Music, the music is in my opinion generally bad, compared to the fantastic Dark Souls soundtrack this was very disappointing.

All in all I think they did a very good job, it's not quite as special as the first one but it isn't a disappointment.