A game that could have been every bit as good as it failed to be.
At first glance the game is somewhat akin to a third person Morrowind/Oblivion game set in a not entirely dissimilar world. There is no visual customization to your character, but there (At first glance, at least) is quite a bit you can do with your skills. You gain points with which you can specialize in different kinds of skills, weapons, magics, etc.
However, before talking about the rest of the game, I can already point out some major failures in the skill system. First of all, rather than starting as a rather neutrally skilled character, you are pretty much 100% brute combat oriented from the get go, which means that if you have any interest at all in being a magic user/caster, you're going to be fighting an up-hill battle for a very, very long time. And guess what else, there isn't even any natural mana regeneration, meaning you'll be drinking potions until you train that particular skill, which requires a virtual mastery of magic in order to learn.
Next on the "list of bad" is the combat, which is the worst of all. First off, there is a veeeerrrryy strange distinction about how combat works, dependent on where you are. For instance, if you're in town and you "kill" someone, you then have to administer a killing blow to actually kill them, as opposed to wilderness areas where a death is final. This plays into the whole "choose to side with the resistance or the orcs" plot, but as you experience it, it feels very strange and contrived. Combat is also very badly implemented. Several creatures in the game become far too difficult, not because of their power or heatlh, but because of the way their attacks, and yours, strike, etc. For instance wolves have an annoying lung attack that can close the distance between you and it before you can react, and stun you long enough to rob you of any chance of reaction before it hits you again, and so forth. And wolves are one of the more basic enemies, these problems are magnified ten-fold in larger, more dangerous creatures. You will also find yourself in many occasions where you are vastly outnumbered, and here is where combat begins to get strangely designed. Enemies will, seemingly inexplicably alternate between standing there and watching you fight them one at a time, and all becoming master archers, able to instantly pick you off at a long distance without fail.
There are very few items to grab, despite this being an RPG, and they fall into three categories: weapons/armor, materials, and trash. The first is as self-explanatory as it is meager. There are perhaps a dozen total weapons to be found, and most of which are of varying degress of worthlessness. Armor is even more scarce, and strangely tied almost exclusively to faction alignment. The second is a very very poorly implemented crafting system. The developers made a half-assed attempt at including crafting materials, including infrequently found mining nodes for metals, etc. However, all of the crafted items are identical to what can be found in the world, and are generally just as useless. Even more annoying is the fact that by the time you can craft the more useful items they've already become useless to you.
The game also crashes a LOT, which easily becomes the most annoying part about the travesty. Unfortunately the game's developer went under shortly after the game's release, so these technical issues were never, and likely will never be resolved to, unless by some strangely devoted fan.
Despite all of these hideously obvious flaws, the world is indeed open and visually appealing, with a very attractive storyline to go along with it. If you can somehow stomach all of the problems, it is worth at least a peek, though I warn you that you won't like the vast majority of what you see.