Breaching greatness in many ways, this flawed masterpiece is a gem if you can bear with the flaws.
I think I kept this game around because I new there was greatness inside and I finally gave it one more try recently, got past a few flaws and bugs, to find that it really was fun and creative.
I would agree with many that it's more of a fps with skill trees than a role playing game. The "shooter" part of that acronym would be arrows/spells and or swords in any combination.
To get the showstoppers for me out of the way, there were a few that made me quit altogether. One was the automatic save feature that would save 3 seconds before you failed a mission just to bring you back in into a circular fail rotation until you loaded a previous save game. Others were your first combat, right off the bat, started you with virtually nothing to fight with and about 1/4 health just to get owned by a ghoul over and over. Another showstopper was the mission failing constantly when you wouldn't turn the right way or find a switch in time.
Adding to the suspension of disbelief was voice acting that sounds like 2 of your friends trying hard to sound like guards and a story that really felt great and then would just blow it at times. For instance, you start off having to kill a giant cyclops that's ravaging the castle walls. You are just a grunt, there are tons of guards around and they tell you that you have to man a huge crossbow and kill him because they are unable to? Another example is chasing a ghoul that the game is programmed to not let you kill, but if you get just a little too far behind at any point, while your jumping over rooftops and scaling walls, the mission fails and you have to reload.
Other problems are that you can not alt tab this game as it will stay minimized and you will have to kill the program and reload. You collect lots and lots of swords that you never see in your inventory and your mana runs out with just a couple spells and regenerates early on too slow to be useful, forcing you to do melee combat.
That all aside, the game has some really fun moments and some very creative encounters where you can use some of the physics from the HL2 engine to bring down your enemies in creative ways. I also enjoy games where there are multiple ways to complete an objective like this game offers many times. It gives you a little feeling of control and helps immerse you into the story a little further.
After getting through some of the complaints above the game has some good fun to it and I would recommend it.