Wins you over INSTANTLY!
After minimal character creation, I jumped right in to hacking and slashing and was instantly won over by the top notch graphics, animations and highly addictive gameplay. Before you know it, I had leveled up and was questing with several characters, male and female, warrior and mage.
This is a game that knows what it is and most importantly, what it is NOT. It isn't a stealth RPG or high concept experience. It is a fantasy action RPG that plays extremely well and looks good doing it. The controls are very intuitive, owing mostly to the games that it has borrowed heavily from and it varies the locations and places throughout so it never became boring to me. The areas are vast and there are countless hours of gameplay to be had.
The game is very forgiving which, to me, is a good thing as you're never stuck too long as one type of character with a skill set that gets old quickly. Having a few characters was fun too as the offensive and defensive variations are immense. There are WAY too many to even begin to explain, but you'll have fun discovering them for yourself.
Upon finishing TQ, I ran right out and bought the Immortal Throne expansion pack for $19.99 because I just HAD to have it. As of this writing, I am well over 100 hours into the game and am still playing (off and on) over a year after purchase. My son has about 60 hours of experience too and has shown me new items, equipment and skills. We can play it for 20 minutes or two hours at a stretch. Not bad value for any PC game. God knows, I never invested this much in Madden.
BTW, beware reviewers who had crashing problems as the developer put some anti-piracy mechanisms into the game. Not that it helped stop the piracy at all. The only issues I saw were the usual clipping and jerkey animations that occasionally bogged down the experience. That's nitpicking, really. The frame-rates remained constant, at about 30 FPS on my machine in-game (even with combat) and 60 on the menu screens.
Too bad Iron Lore is no more. I was looking forward to more from them.