I approached this game with hesitation, I have fond memories of the Might & Magic name that I didn't want to tarnish, from the old games of the 1990s. I shouldn't have worried!
This is the one of the few First-Person games I've played where I relished being ambushed randomly or running into that surprise group of enemies. The mutable environment and the ability to have some real world effects makes game-play very enjoyable. You can knock your opponents down, they will be stunned if you land a blow. Sneak up on them or surprise them by rushing in. Use a very powerful blow or a flurry of small attacks. Better still -- shove them off a cliff, kick them down, push them onto impaling spikes, set them on fire... it's fun!!
So say you're on a bridge and a horde of goblins comes rushing across at you. You pull out your trusty staff (moves realistically like a long-staff in martial-arts) and whack them around, keeping them off-balance and knocked down. You could keep on and kill them this way but it's taking a while since the staff doesn't do much damage. So you start kicking and shoving them off the bridge! It's disturbingly fun.
You won't want to kill the baddies the old-fashioned way considering all the options.
I was most concerned I would hate the sections with jumping puzzles -- I still get irritated thinking about the idiotic puzzles inspired by the early Tomb Raider games. They were hard to solve, you'd get half-way, then you fall. Start the jumping over or reload... Ugh.
Turns out that these folks must not like that experience either. Jumping / climbing is a big part of the game, but not difficult and not super-ultra-precise like Tomb Raider. yay!
Some of the combat scenes are hard, but nothing that requires many retrys, though you may end up reloading just to see if you can kill the baddies in different ways. There's some autosaving also.
The game isn't perfect. It's a little too linear, with only a few plot branches, and only a modest number of areas for unstructured exploration. Cut-scenes and loads disrupt game-flow. Like most games of this genre, you occasionally get stuck on an in-game corner, or see minor clipping (can see through a wall or other "solid" object). There are times when you know you can go through that passage but have to spend a few moments lining up JUST right, as if your character couldn't figure out he just needs to pull in his knees or whatever. And it's pretty, but not gorgeous like Oblivion.
The biggest problem is in the first areas of the game (practice and the area after that), where I noticed what others complained about: the game dropping out to Windows occasionally, especially during combat. You could resume by selecting the suspended game from the taskbar, but you'd lose a couple of often-fatal seconds in the meantime. I'm not sure if this was somehow related to other Windows software (such as for my Logitech keyboard/mouse), but the problem stopped on its own with no changes on my part, after the end of those first areas.
I will disagree with other reviewers who state this needs a high-end system to play. I played this on a current entry level PC (mid 2007, lowest-end dual core Intel) but with a moderate, recent video card (Nvidia 8600GT, this model: XFX PVT84JUDD3 GeForce 8600GT XXX 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 SLI Ready Video Card (Dual DVI/S-Video)). Unfortunately, the on-board graphics of PCs are inadequate for most modern Windows games so plan to have an add-in card; that's just the way it is. With that 8600GT, I was able to run at a reasonable resolution with most effects turned up to high or maximum, no problems other than the clipping I mention above.
For the current bargain price, and this level of entertainment, highly recommended!
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