One step forward, two steps back.
Graphically, it's fine. It looks as good as you would expect any recent last-gen sports game to, and it is a big improvement upon the original in just about every department, except in the key area which saved the graphics of the original; the animation. While in the first 'Rugby League' game, the smooth and fluent animation made the low level of detail on the character models hardly noticeable, the jerky animation in this game really detracts from the polished appearance of the characters.
The sound is more or less the same, but crowd sounds seem to have died down since the first game, but the ref speech is still there (although, for whatever reason, the ref himself isn't).
The biggest flaw, which prevents this game from even coming close to it's potential, is in the gameplay, which is also the biggest step backwards from the original. While the control in the first game was sharp and responsive, the players in this game have the turning speed of freight trains, and reaction speeds so slow that you'd think they were on dope. This leaves you pretty well just pointing in a general direction, and hoping that they manage to find a gap; all the precision of creating and using space in the first game is more or less completely gone. The number of times that my player ran into touch because I couldn't turn them away fast enough was also ridiculous (something that never happened to me at all in the first game); I took to just avoiding the sides of the pitch and playing entirely down the middle.
In terms of longevity; there is plenty to do and unlock, but matches become so tiresome due to the sluggishness of the controls that you probably won't want to. The biggest step forward in this respect is the addition of online multiplayer (the first in any Rugby game), and at least here your opponent is trying to work around the same unresponsive controls.
Overall, I would rather they had just polished the graphics of the first game than tried to completely change the gameplay formula, which they have essentially ruined.