First, the ugly. Combat in the game is based off the old AD&D ruleset, making it absolutely horrific. It can be manipulated quite a bit, and there are ways to make the enemy AI do things which are borderline insipid. The UI takes a lot of getting used to. Also, there is about a novel's worth of text to read. This isn't an exaggeration; there is actually about three hundred pages worth of words. Lastly, this game takes a big buy-in of time to understand. There's a significant section of the game, especially at the beginning, where you're faced with a vast open world and not too much direction. It can be a bit daunting for a while to pick up the threads of what you want to do. This is not a game to go into without a FAQ!
Don't run.
The pros are: First, the visual aesthetic is one of the best gaming has ever set pushed out. The original source material was visually very striking and they did a great job of capturing it. The music is very solid and fits as well, but does get a bit repetitive due to the length of the game. Second, all that text is amazing. First, it's entertaining. The game has moments of great humor, intricate, beautiful story, surprisingly deep thoughts, and downright crushing emotional impact. This is a contender for one of the few games that might actually make you cry if you explore everything that's happened to the characters. As for depth, well, I showed it to some grad-school friends of mine in divinity and philosophy while I was doing poli-philo, and we would be able to talk about its insanely intelligent treatment of everything from comparative religion to how government and power and war interacted. It does this just by putting dialog in the mouth of NPCs who have to deal with these problems, as does the protagonist. This is a mix of "deep" and "emotional" which I've -never- seen a game come close to touching. Not one, ever. For those who like their "moral choice in RPGs", wow. You've got choices from the crushingly cruel to incredibly noble, and unlike those in, say, Mass Effect, it's not "pull this lever to save the rachni queen, this one to kill them all." You need to see it, but it's conflicts which are much more human in scope. That also helps with the game's open-endedness. Because the NPCs are all so well-written, they have motivations where manipulating or aiding -them- is one of the ways to get things done. You gain more XP for finding resolutions to problems or quests than for stabbing everything in your way, and many players believe maxing out your mental and social skills is the best way to break the game.
The creativity and characterization in the game are stunning. If you care at all for characters if well written, the cast of this game stick with you. They're also one of the most intricate in any game ever written. This game features a chaste succubus priestess, a floating skull pervert, an insane wizard who is on fire, a titanic war machine whose only job is to continue to craft the weapons which end the world, a pillar of skulls made out of damned liars, and a devil warmaster who's stuck at home and is cursed to be extra nice to everybody. It makes you want to play just to see what's next.
The people who worked on this game were the ones who went on to found Obsidian. I'd liken it to KotOR II if KotOR II had been finished properly. It's arguably their best story. It's their smartest, funniest, and most emotional. The design is fantastic. But the flaws I mentioned in the first paragraph are there, and it'll take a bit to get past them. Once you do, you're going to find an incredibly well-planned, artful, and beautiful story that happens to be in the media of video games.
