If you've played Civilization, think of this as a fantasy version along with RPG elements.
You'll build cities, hire champions, personally design your soldiers (not kidding, there is a in-game tool to design your own soldiers - which includes how they look), and even get married and have kids. Yes, you read correctly, you can indeed get married and have children. Since magic in the game has almost been wiped out from a war long ago, magic is almost non-existent, yet your main character has it to some extent (depending on how many points you spend on it), and he can pass it along to his kids as well.
You'll be busy building your kingdom or empire, going on quests with your sovereign and his group of trusted champions, or even take a mob of personally created soldiers with you too. There is also a layer of kingdom to kingdom warfare, as well as trading for technology and resources, making alliances, and even political marriages between your children and another sovereign's children (yup, not kidding).
Good
+ Deep mixture of RPG, kingdom building, and with a dash of dynasty building
+ Stylish graphics
+ It comes with a powerful tile creator, as well as a map creator
+ Very high replay value
Bad
- There are some balance issues
- AI isn't the most intelligent (although, the developers say they're constantly improving it).
- The game does stall and crash from time to time.
- Pacing can be a bit slow sometimes.
I think the game is pretty good, although being that it's the first of it's kind in a long time, it's pretty much breaking new ground with what it's trying to do. The game is enjoyable, aside from the crashes, and it will give you something to do for quite some time. If they worked out some of the crashing issues that people seem to have, balanced the game a bit more, cranked up the AI difficulty a couple notches, this could have been a 9.0/10. Either way, you'll get a good game.
PS. If you are into fantasy games, do yourself a favor and just get it. It's one of those games that scratch that itch, that many games out there don't do, if you get my meaning.