As an overall game, yes.  Lords of Shadow 2 is better than the first one.  The first one tried to do way too much which made the game worse in my opinion.

Yeah, but not playable and other than a glimpse at the beginning of the game, you won't see him until the end of the game.  It was actually just announced today there would be Alucard DLC on March 25th.  I'm disappointed it's DLC as I very rarely purchase digital and only when it's dirt cheap, so I probably won't ever play the DLC. 

Well I was interested in this game, thought the first one was really good; can't believe the level of vitriol its getting from gaming sites. Why don't they pick apart games like COD or The Last of Us? Surely if you pick apart one game you should do that to all the others. This looks to be a great game, some reviewers have awarded very good scores.

While I agree that it is getting overly harsh treatment overall, this game is not even close to as good as the first.  It was OK but they definitely do not deserve praise or a high meta.  Wait until you play the stealth sections.  it is bizarre these made it to the final gold release.  Game has great combat like the first but is sub par in almost every other aspect.  6.5-7/10.  Definitely isn't a 4/10 like some sites are giving it.  It seems like all the pieces of a great staff were there great art direction, great enemy design, boss design, good animators, but then terrible writing, all over the place Dracula dynamics and complete absensce of lead direction.  Who ever directed this game did a massively poor job, IMO.  It also seems blatant that once this game was 100% finished it was not played through from start to finish at all.  It has no flow.

Well I actually heard about how the game had some serious development problems, but I doubted they were true. It seems if the game is truly as the reviewers say then thats unfortunate.

Here is the link to some of those problems I heard about:

http://www.vg247.com/2014/03/01/castlevania-lords-of-shadow-2-dev-steps-forward-to-confirm-troubled-development-reports/

After a big more digging some people seem to think the lack of involvement of Hideo Kojima on this game is what led to this alleged development problems. Kojima helped out a bit on LOS1, which is probably what led to a cohesive development; unlike LOS2 which appears to have been a bit more disjointed by comparasion. Personally I don't care, I will be getting the game soon, it still looks great as far as I'm concerned.