It's an acquired taste
The Matrix Online has a very original style of gameplay, which is, of course, based loosely upon the events of the Matrix trilogy. The ability system is very good, and allows for greater replay value. Most of what makes the game great is it's community, and incredibly original style and form of gameplay. Unfortunately, the development team that is completely apathetic about how the community, and game as a whole, function. The Graphics are quite good, I'm not sure about how well it runs on a lower-end system, but with 256Megs of video and 1Gb of RAM it runs very smoothly. The sound, on the other hand, is exceptionally bad. You hear the same 3 songs all the time, and in some areas you get ambient noises that become so irritating that you must force yourself to either listen to music, or turn the sound off all together. The in-game radio is a good feature, it allows you to listen to music that is integrated into the game. In terms of value, basically, once you get to level 50, there is nothing else to do. Usually, by the time you reach level 50, you will have experimented with all the ability trees anyways.
In conclusion, you should definately try this one, if you don't like it, whatever. You won't die simply because you got a game you didn't like, it happens. If you like it, great, join a faction. It could have been much better, and hopefully the development team can get off their posteriors and fix some of the bugs. If they can manage that, MxO could be big again.