Well, it's now a year ago since I played Gothic 2, but I mostly enjoyed it. The interface is very simple, the controls needs much time to get into flesh and blood, the combat is at the beginning hard, but if you can forgive those little issues, you'll be rewarded with a very classical, high rich detailed and atmospheric Action RPG. The strength of the game is surely not the setting, presentation, combat rule work (there is none) or high quality conversations a'la Kotor, but if you join a faction (Paladins, Monks or Dragonkiler) and get deeper into the story and quests, it's very immersive. Paladins (rise from militia to knight to paladin) e.g. can forge ruins to perform some nice spells, but they're also very well trained with the sword, an allrounder type. You can sanctify our sword at the monestary to do more damage, physical or magic.
An other faction are the dragon killer (rise from mercenarie to stronger mercenarie to dragon killer), those are at home at Omars yard and are not good at drinking some tea with the paladins. I never played the monks, but they are skilled with magic, are good in brewing some potions with different plants you can pick up, can sell it and so forth. Which faction you join has some impacts on which quests you do and how people of other factions like you, but though it doesn't feel so different like Kotor does. So overall it's very good and I can reccomed it, but in comparison with Kotor it's surely the loser. But hey, Piranha Bytes consists of only ~13 people, Bio has ~ 170... very impressive game for such a little team....
In Germany, Austria and Switzerland btw the Gothic series is very popular, maybe first because of the setting that is more placed in the dark german saga, but the other and imo the main reasons is probably the voice acting. I heard from many people that the english version is completely messed up, bad voice actors (well, atari really sucks in this regard) with inproper voices and then I guess the language itself....the german version had the proper style of pronunciation, and the meaning of some expressions was unique that you can't translate into english, so I think the german voice acting fitted the chars and the setting very well, that was a big plus.