That review sums up most of what I thought about the game. I notice you also got One of Many to refer to you as 'Dark One', I liked thta little touch. Irritating that in it's floats when it responds to your voice commands it still refers to you as 'Master'.
Epic Levels do mean a lot of +1 to this ability/stat, and a lot of epic versions of old feats that do the same thing, with +3 instead of +2. There are a handful of epic feats which do do something completely new, though. Epic Resilience is nice (no more auto-fail when you roll a 1 on a save) epic dodge lets you completely ignore 1 attack per round from your current target or last attacker. It's mostly pretty uninspiring compared to the first 20 levels though. D&D's sweet psot is between about levels 4 and 14. Before 4 combat is too much about 'lucky crits', and resultant reloads. After level 14 is when it gets a bit insane, and after 20 it's mostly just new ranks of old abilities.
I mostly enjoyed the combat. Because there wasn't so much of it what there was, was more enjoyable. No endless fights against packs of trivial Orcs which only test your patience. I was expecting it to be a bit harder after reading numerous threads about how insaney hard it was supposed to be, people crying about the fight against the 2 nightwalkers, or the fight against the 3 Death Knights. The Nightwalkers were cake, it's just a matter of being able to deal the right kind of damage aginst them. The Death Knights are perfectly doable as long as you prepare correctly and have some kind of clue about what you're doing. It wasn't overly challenging, I never got stuck with combat, it didn't get in the way of the story, but it wasn't so easy as to be boring and pointless.
The Spirit-Meter was fine. Moron-Meter is a perfect name for it, because onyl a total moron would have any difficulty with it. Just because you're evil doesn't mean you have to eat 10 spirits a day and get 100 craving instantly. It should be a total non-issue for good characters; and just a matter of not being a total moron for evil characters. Hell, there's always Satiate, it only costs 5-10 minutes worth of XP.
The game is definitely worth at least 2 playthroughs, just to see how differently so many things can turn out. There's also a number of things that you can very easily miss. It might not be like Arcanum where I'd still find new things even on my 15th playthrough, but there's a lot. I've been conditioned to expect false-choices, the example in the review about the witch-overthrow is a good one. If you're too used to games that don't give you real choices, you can miss some of the choices here. Unlike in the OC when, on the rare occaision you get a real choice, the game makes sure to very clearly articulate what the choice is, and what your options are; MotB's choices often need to be sought out. A lot of times the PC has to actually show initiative (!) and look for an alternate solution. Ashenwood (an area you could conceivably miss althogether; actually there was a thread on the Bio Boards where osme guy was asking what Ashenwood was, he never found it in his playthrough) comes to mind as having several good examples of this.
Easily a top 10 RPG for me.
