The boat races are a bit dull, but aside from that, I love it. Planes are more fun than I thought they'd be, and the car physics have been improved a lot. Well, rather... the handling. It's extremely arcadey, maybe even more so than the first game (though, warning: don't forget to check your driving assistances, by defualt everything is on, and it does feel a bit railroad-y) but its more FUN. Cars simply feel better. I'm also glad it didnt go the NFS route of drifting everywhere, there's decent amount of grip.
The game still has a story, but it's a lot more light hearted and classic "be the best" type of thing. You can finally choose your own character though, and while there's a lot of dudebro voice over, at least it's fitting in terms of atmosphere.
I love the added immersion stuff like walking around the dealers or having your own house. Kudos for revamping the interior view as well and getting rid of the silly wobble animation when driving straight.
Visually the game is a huge step up as well, and not just graphically but the HUD and menus are much slicker too. They also got rid of the microstutter in the PC version, so now it feels smooth, though still capped at 60 fps unfortunately.
Negatives? Well, I'm saddened by the fact that there's LESS snowy areas instead of more, which I hoped for :(. The coop connectivity also remains mixed. There's a nasty bug affected quite a lot of people in the first game that got carried over, which means that certain people will simply unable to see/invite eachother, regardless of their NAT status. This affects me and one of my friends in our group which unfortunately does kind of ruin the whole coop aspect.
Finally, I have managed to buy quite a lot of cars in the few horus I played the beta, so I'd say they also rebalanced the economy. The first game was pretty bad in this regard, felt like you were aggressively pushed towards mtx.