I love Dragon Age: Origins. I have literally put hundreds of hours into it and probably more than I should admit.  However, I have been burned in past from buying on heritage or name alone and have taken a skeptical view on sequels & new IPs.  Despite my enjoyment and continuing desire to play DA:O, I still turn this discerning eye on DA2.
 
My first reason comes in the form of a cautionary tale from the Mass Effect series.  BioWare has taken a more action-oriented approach to DA2; exemplified by their phrase "when you press a button, something awesome happens."  The former action-leaning philosophy is the one they took when going from ME1 to ME2.  The ME series went from shooter / rpg to shooter with light leveling mechanics that don't matter.  BioWare then went on to write a nonsensical main plot.  They set the Illusive Man up as someone personally involved in all his projects, something EDI mentions, but all the gruesome ME1 Cerberus actions were done by "rogue groups" within Cerberus.  So which is it?  Is he incredibly organized and involved or is he dumb enough to let half his organization go rogue?  Then there is the circular logic that makes you work for Cerberus: you work for Cerberus because the Alliance & Council reject you, but they reject you because you work for Cerberus.  The final boss is a developmentally challenged Terminator torso.  Will BioWare give the DA2 story this same treatment?  After all, if all their attention is on redesign and making battles more action-oriented, then who's manning the story?
 
Granted, BioWare games offer little real choice.  No matter what, you are going to go to the same places, do the same things, and end up in the same final encounter(s), but there are little things you can do in those places and ways to go about those same things that make the game your own.  In ME1, you had moral choices that didn't necessarily live on the Save Puppies - Eat Babies black & white scale.  You could save or destroy the Rachni and had good reasons to do either one.  You could kill or knock out the colonists on Feros and again there was reason behind it.  You could choose to save the Council or concentrate on Sovereign.  
 
In ME2, you get 2 choices throughout the entire game.  You can rewrite or destroy the "heretic" geth.  Although that one has no consequences or fallout (yet), it was at least in the spirit of the previous game.  The other is whether to destroy the collector's base at the end of the game.  This however is not a matter of choice, but whether you are good or evil.  The smart thing to do, in order to stop the reapers, is to keep the base.  If you destroy it, all the people kidnapped and killed to make the Terminator will have died in vain, but if you save it and use its tech to save the galaxy, then at least something good came out of what caused their deaths.  Yeah yeah, destroying the base "avenged" them, but your mission isn't vengeance, it's to stop the reapers.  Instead, you are called a villain and stupid if you keep the base.  If you destroy it, you are the conquering hero who stuck it to the man, the Illusive Man, after working for him the entire game.  Will choices also go from choosing the dwarf king and whether to save or kill the mages disappear in favor of no choices?  They say no, but they pulled this once already.
 
Now why is this comparison apt?  They are advertising more action, for one, which they did when going from ME1 to ME2.  They are adopting the conversation wheel.  They are narrowing down the character field to just one: Hawke.  Instead of getting the choice of dwarf, elf, or human, that choice is made for us.  Not that that's bad, but it is like Mass Effect.  ME is Shepard's story.  DA2 is Hawke's story.  That's far more specific than the pupil's story in Jade Empire, the warden's story in DA:O, the recruit's story in Neverwinter Nights, or what I've played of Baldur's Gate so far.  In principle at least in both series, they appear to be going more toward "X with RPG mechanics" instead of "X / RPG" or just "RPG" and this is why I make the comparison.

I don't normally harp on combat mechanics unless they get in the way.  I do miss the time when I didn't quite know what I was doing in DA:O and got my ass handed to me. The joy of discovering the best tactics, party, and skills.  I just got too good.  Now I see gameplay footage of DA2 and see Hawke jumping around the whole screen like it's all staged choreography.  If you can play it as an action RPG then sorry, but saying you can "play it tactically" is disingenuous.  You can , sure, but there is no need.  That means that there is not necessarily (and likely) the level of tactical involvement you're advertising.  If I can play it fast and loose, then pulling back and going the pause and play approach is just the slow way, not the tactical way.  There may very well be a few battles where playing the fast way will get my group killed, but a few moments of having to think doesn't make up for an entire game of hack'n'slash when you call it an RPG.
 
The art redesign is the one part of the game that I find no overall fault in.  My only nitpick is the wussification of the darkspawn.  The new hurlock images are white dudes with no lips and not the scary monsters of DA:O.  Keep in mind that darkspawn are not people.  They are not people who became darkspawn.  They are monsters and looked like such in DA:O.  Now they look more human, which is not the way to go.  I have no problem with the art style itself or the redesign of some DA:O NPCs or the race redesign, but the hurlocks really really bug me.
 
Call me greedy, but I want good, tactical gameplay, story of a caliber BioWare has proven itself capable of in the past, and less of the crap of that went into ME2's story in the next installment of the Dragon Age franchise.  So far I have yet to see anything that shows me that this is the case.  Yeah, it may be a fun game that I could enjoy playing, but is it a good western RPG follow up to DA:O?  That remains to be seen.