I bought the game today and expected the worst. I expected a buggy crash ridden mess of a game which wouldn't be playable for a few more months.
What I got wasn't near as bad as a lot of people are saying. Not one crash, not one bug (yet), the sandbox game is fun although a little confusing right now. The campaign is ok. Nothing out of the ordinary concerning the campaign, but that is about par for course concerning fantasy strategy. Fantasy wars or Age of Wonders had your usual big bad guy you have to defeat and honestly how can you have a strategy game without some faction to destroy. Although Majesty 1 and 2 were a lot more interesting.
One thing that really annoys me is the combat. In more than one battle the enemy will ignore all my other units and head straight to my heroes. Two of them are so weak right now that I'm just bringing them along for the ride to get some experience. So while the monsters head to my heroes I get to pound the living daylights out of them. I hope that changes later in the campaign.
The manual needs to be updated as well. It's very extensive in some ways and woefully lacking in others. Just give me a dang tech tree so I know what I'm researching. I may have missed it somewhere, but I can't find a tech tree anywhere in the manual or the help button. The help button does show you a list of all of the available technologies, but not in any kind of order. Maybe I need to just play through the campaign to get a handle on that. The other thing is buildings. If I have researched a building then show it somewhere in the city screen even if I don't have the resources to build it right then. It shows you all the available units you can build, but buildings keep popping up only when you are able to buy them. This may only be for the campaign, but it's annoying as heck.
I do not like the graphics. I can forgive them that, but Dart had it right when he said they should of went 2D.
Now for a couple of things I do like about this game. Factions!!!! Not only do you get to choose what race you want, but what faction you want to belong to. I like being able to mix and match my civ that way. The other thing is unit customization. Finally! A MOO like fantasy civ game where you can customize your units. I can't recall any fantasy civ game giving you this option. Right now in the campaign my units are very limited in what I can add to them, but later on this should become as fun as MOO was when I was customizing ships.
After some polishing and future tweaking I can see this game becoming one of those games that are always installed and played years on down the line.
Edit: I almost forgot to mention. My version says 1.06. They must have patched it right before I downloaded it. That might explain the totally different experience I had versus others.
Here's a link explaining what's new in v1.06. You'll have to start a whole new game unfortunately.
Also I was a bit hasty with my gripe about the greyed out buildings. I hadn't progressed far enough in the campaign and didn't play the sandbox that long to see they do show you what buildings your able to build whether you have the resources or not. It's those dang huts that keep popping up out of the blue that confused me.