I did not play the first Colonization, so I have no comparison of features in my mind. With that said, I voted no overall. It's nice for temporary diversion and a diversion that explores that genre and time span, but it lacks in some important features that make a "great" game.
I like the new graphics especially the water effects. The trading is interesting at first, but it wears thin after a while. As mentioned elsewhere, the natives at some point will want guns which I tend to not want to give them. Also, they quickly started wanting to pay less for goods than I could both sell them for in Europe or buy them from Europe, so in several cases I gave up trying to trade with them because it wasn't worth the trouble of transporting goods from somewhere only to find that I was losing money.
A major sticking point is that the game is too heavy on micromanagement for me. I like the specialized colonist professions, but that ends up being yet more micromanagement because the game does always not properly place the settlers in their best trade.
You can automate the wagon trains to carry prominently produced goods back and forth. So the developers tried to provide a means to automate the resource movement, but the wagon train routes still fall short on the ease of use side because I can't always remember which wagon routes I have assigned between which cities. This is a little exacerbated because of the warehouse storage limits since the wagon will dump the load even if the warehouse is "full" of that good. (Someone please correct me if I missed some features on some of this.) So, even if you automate some features like taking food to a low food city or coats to your main port city, you can end up losing resources. Simple things like transporting guns and horses etc. to each city is tedious for me at least.
My personal rating would be: C-. I played the beginning of several games and one game to an advanced stage. But I ended up cheating to win it because I wanted to see the ending, but it was not fun enough to fight through all of the micromanagement to win. I would just as soon start up another game of CivIV.