So the actual review is coming out in May, but I'm now halfway done with the game and can state a few of my thoughts so far:
1.) Graphics are a bit rough when it comes to discerning what you are looking at. The game looks like it came from the late 80s or early 90s when it comes to detail. I normally don't care too much about graphics, but it is hard to see what you are looking at most of the time. For instance, a chicken is a set of small white pixels that could have been any bird, or a piece of blowing paper for all I knew. Mousing over to an item does help, as does the fact that loot is given a blinking set of pixels so treasure is not easily missed.
2.) Enemies that you fight often seem to drop loot that does not match what you expect them to have on them. Sometimes I fought bandits and found a simple weapon on them and shield, but no armor even though their icons looked as if they might be wearing leather. Then again with the low level of detail, maybe they were wearing brown clothes and not brown leather armor. Again, hard to tell.
3.) I like the skill-based system, and the fact that magic is important, but not as dangerous or critical as it is in a D&D based game. There also doesn't seem to be a dump stat, as each is important. Right now I am running with a party of three melee combatants (my main character is one), one ranged attacker, and a spellcaster who throws vials when not using spells. I think you would be better off creating your own party and optimizing their abilities and skills for a certain style of play, but I like the idea of recruiting NPCs from those that I meet in game. The NPCs that I have recruited don't have the personality of a Baldur's Gate game, although they have some rough discussions about their stated goals.
4.) Combat is real-time with pause, but tactics are limited. Outnumbering your opponents matters greatly, so I have been practicing alerting an enemy to my presence, getting him to leave the group he is with to attack me, then leading him away and into an ambush in order to make it 5-on-1 or 5-on-2 odds. That's the way I've been winning most battles against strong enemies since combat is brutal and healing slow, so you can easily lose a character if not careful. Some spells like Hallucination are awesome, while others I wouldn't bother to invest points into. Strangely, you can gain XP when allies, such as city guards, attack and kill an enemy even if you were not involved in the fight.
5.) I really, really like how you start off the game pretty weak and have to slowly build yourself up. I spent a lot of the start of the game with basic armor, a knife, and a shield. Slowly, I defeated better armed and armored opponents to build up my own inventory. Or I would take money earned and purchase better weapons and armor I found from merchants. Right now my party wears heavier, non-magical armor, helmets, and shields and have magical weapons. My spellcaster and shooter fire magical munitions with non-magical ranged weapons. There has been no specially named armor or weapon yet, but instead they are given basic plus bonuses when shown to be magical.
6.) The game is detailed in some places, then bland in others. The manual and background story is incredibly detailed. You can run into innkeepers that tell you a lot of in game lore, such as about local unrest and violence in farther away lands. Then you'll walk into a city full of NPCs that mostly can't talk, and the ones that do talk to you have barely anything interesting to say. It's like the city was built just so you can trade with a variety of merchants and then move on to the next encounter. There was a temple that I visited that had four different priest of for different religions just hanging out together in a chamber. When you talk to the four of them, three tell you to move along as their god doesn't agree with you. The fourth is an ally of the Moon God, so he gives you a small tidbit of information of where you must go for the next clue in the storyline. Since religion and gods are supposed to matter a lot more in this story, you would have think that the game would have really beefed up the lore here instead of leaving you with such a letdown. Darklands, which influenced this game, was better at this despite being more limited because every location was infused with cultural or religious references.
7.) The game is grimdark to a fault. The one character who seems supportive of you simply because he seems to be just a great guy is killed off during the game seemingly unnecessarily. Everyone else you meet is some category of asshole. There are people who live right outside your starting point who treat you suspiciously since you seem to be a foreigner, even when I brought two NPCs with me who had been living near that town for some time. You meet one NPC who wants to join you because she is tired of the backwater village she was stuck with and the people there. There are a number of NPCs that ask you to sell someone an NPC into slavery. A couple of thugs kills a woman who cheated on her man, because said man put a bounty on her for her infidelity. Another NPC craves battle and exploration and joins you because your trip promises the potential for violence. Two girls you can recruit are in a brothel and wish to flee, and if you say you can only take one of them, the older one is ready to ditch the younger without missing a beat. Both are highly trained in violence though, so there is that. One town of folks watches your every move with suspicion. The police (arbiters) act like entitled thugs. A chief arbiter admits to being too important to be on the front lines with his men. Many NPC encounters lead to a dialogue that results in violence no matter your response or your skill points placed in speaking abilities. Everyone seems to be in a competition for the title of Jerky McAsshat.
8.) The problem with grim dark is that it causes me not to care about the people of the game. At one point I told some forest spirits about a village they could attack, and when I went back inside the village I found it overrun. Now normally I would have reloaded, but since everyone there acted as bigoted jerks I decided I'd rather enjoy the fact that I could get more experience and loot coming back to this now respawning town of forest creatures and bandits than I ever could solving that locations series of quests. I would have reloaded this game at an earlier save point if this was an Ultima, Baldur's Gate, or Exile game.
9.) There are small errors in game. At one point I entered a town without a hitch, but on my way out a guard tried to charge me money to enter. Another location had a creature attack me next to some town guards, and when I engaged it and killed it, the guards attacked me. When I reloaded and entered the town, I ran away from the creature and let the arbiters kill it and was left alone.