Just played for about 3.5 hours. If you liked the first one you will like this one, it is bigger and better. Death plays so different from how War did. War was about brute force and was slow, Death is so damn agile and makes mince meat of stuff with his attacks being so fast and dual wielding weapons. You can use different weapons to change have you fight a lot, there are scythes, claws, axes, hammers so far I've come across, the axes and hammers are big 2 handed weapons that will bring the pain but are slow to attack with while scythes and claws are shredding machines.
Death himself is damn quick and he climbs up and runs on walls and uses a lot of stuff to jump to and from to move around the environments. This one has a lot more RPGish features, you level up and have 2 different skill trees you can select from, kills drop loot as well as chests, besides weapons you have all the normal slots of armor and a talisman. You can buy and sell stuff from various vendors as well. There are possessed weapons that you can feed other weapons to it to level it up as well. You have abilities like the first game but there are much more like spells and wrath is treated like mana with Death. Lots of things to collect for various stuff as well too.
It has the same amount of options as the first one did as far as config goes (aka pretty much none), but the game does look very nice and seems to be stable.
I'm enjoying it and am happy so far.
If you are looking to get it, try
http://getgamesgo.com/product/darksiders-ii-limited-edition it is $38. I dunno when the price will change, since it is a Steamworks game, no matter where you buy it for the PC you need Steam to play it. Getgamesgo will email you a Steam key and tell you to plug it into Steam to install.