Come back in a year and this game will be worth playing!
I gave it a grade six because i know that the currently pretty much broken game will be repaired in the future, but tell me, and all of hardcore Paradox fans, why do we all have to go through a long period of waiting to get to the point where the game properly works. Let me state my opinion that patches are for tweaking and not for fixing the game.
Concerning the people who are not familiar with this line of games it will be very difficult for them to get the hang of it, many people are already complaining on the Paradox forums on this matter. My advice is to stick with it and you will eventually learn the basics by trial and error, because the tutorials are not very helpful.
On the game-play itself it looks and feels a lot like SR 2020, which i don't really have a problem with, because i like that game, but to my mind it lacks the historical flavour that SR 2020 did not need, cause it was set in the future, not the past. Many of the world leaders are not in the game, especially for the non-European countries, many flags only really represent one period of time, for example if a coup happens in the Kingdom of Egypt the flag does not change to today's flag which represents the Arab nationalist movement which came to power in the early 50's. And many cities on the map have incorrect names, for example Volgograd instead of Stalingrad, by the way Stalin is in power when the game begins, that gave me a nice chuckle.
Second of all, the USSR is split up into colonies, which basically means that you directly control only Russia. I do not like this, and have read many similar posts on Paradox forums, posted by my fellow eastern Europeans. I would like to be able to control the real and historical USSR, and have the loyalties divided inside the country between the different Soviet republics that would eventually make the dissolution possible but not inevitable. My personal grudge is that they have not made modding of loyalty in the game possible, for example it is really weird to see Euskadi (the land of the Basque people) be loyal to Franco's Spain, and yet be completely stuck with this hard-coded non-sense which has a real impact on the game, for example in disloyal areas insurgencies are possible etc.
Thirdly there are a lot of bugs, one major being the crashing save files, which has already been acknowledged by Paradox. This means that after i tried loading all of my several save files, the game randomly crashes after a few game day's pass. Effectively this game is currently unplayable because of this bug.
On the positive note, the unit list is excellent featuring all of the WW 2 greatest armaments. The world economy now poses a real challenge for the experienced player, although the economic part of the map is literally just transferred from SR 2020, so many countries have hydro power plants in the year 49, while most of them were not built by the 60' and 70's. The game runs faster than the SR 2020 which is really important and improves replayability of the game (this was fixed by the update released immediately after the release of the game). The colonies system is a nice improvement from the SR 2020 game-play, and it is actually fun to fund their independence, or try to keep them in line, and all of this has consequences on your diplomatic relations and the sphere of influence. One last thing is the aforementioned sphere of influence that needs tweaking, since it is not logical that you can get a country to be totally USSR aligned and have that country remain democratic, or the other way around make a communist country USA or NATO aligned.
All in all a game that will be fun for gamers who enjoy this genre and developer, ofcourse after several patches have been released and months passed.