The Good:
1) Theme and visuals - top notch, the style is excellent for what they are trying to achieve with this game.
2) Semi-quick leveling due to high quest XP rewards, although rather linear here during the Betas due to some things apparently not being active yet or needing to be a "high" level to access some things to begin with.
3) Storyline - Very fun, and finding the lore objects everywhere is a real treat, with unlocking some of the lore a mini-game in and of itself.
4) Easy to understand stat system, although finding the right balance is key (and not easy to master).
5) An involved crafting system - some have short minigames on top of resource gathering (yay, not WoW-style). You will have to rely on friends/guildies to get some of the materials you need, none of the one-person-does-it-all of most MMOs.
6) Rather straight-forward combat system, with pretty sweet dodge/deflect mechanics (timing is everything when avoiding damage).
7) No real penalty for exploring outside of the map area other than simply taking up your time to see some pretty neat scenery, just don't try to swim across large bodies of water
8) How they handle dying & respawning - better than the average MMO. You actually get a choice in where you rez at least once per hour (town or at the spot you perished, the cooldown was 1hr during this weekend), otherwise, you respawn at a random nearby ghost stone thing.
9) A nice assortment of visual settings for people who have varying types of color blindness. Three cheers for this one, and the best I've ever seen for any computer game, period.
The Bad:
1) The "live" mini-map. Don't even bother looking at it unless you want to stab someone angrily. Normal map is pretty awesome though.
2) The quest direction pointer. It was there, for all of 1.5 seconds.
3) Group questing & the group quest interface is atrocious. I hear this is being worked on and a vastly improved UI is in the works.
4) Having to remap a rather silly amount of keybinds right from the get-go (especially if you use a mouse with more than 3 buttons or have a disability/injury). See #7.
5) Some quest text missing (and other assorted small errors like missing punctuation, etc).
6) Some quest objectives simply failing to register until you've actually done it multiple times in an attempt to get it to "stick" (and sometimes not even then, they just fail to register no matter what). For an example of this - do any of the quests that require you to jump around the scenery and "collect" something, like Fireflies.
7) Using keyboard + mouse to attempt to move around in combat on default settings - If you tried dodging via dash + doublejumps while trying to maintain proper facing with your mouse, you'll know what I mean. After some remapping (putting jump, etc on a mouse button, instead of the default spacebar), this issue is remedied. It's essentially like the old WoW issue of attempting to keyboard turn/jump, etc during combat. The distance trying to reach between the spacebar and the directional arrows on the keyboard at the same time was just too much (before I changed my settings, I had to turn my keyboard at an angle to even do this - my pinky on the spacebar and my thumb on the directional arrows).
The Ugly:
1) I had to submit 158 bug reports over the 6 hrs that I played (Yes, I know this is beta, but seeing how the actual release date is not very far off I found this rather disturbing).
2) There is a serious (and I hope not totally random - random means TAKES FOREVER TO FIX) bug with the "implant" type of gear. Sometimes if you put it on, instead of increasing your stats, etc by what is listed on the item, it simply sets the advertised stat to zero. This is not just a display issue. Your character acts like it has zero of that stat if this happens, so you can just imagine how it hurts in combat when you all of the sudden have zero Brutality or you put on a nice piece of gear to suddenly find your health dropped to zero. This bug is not remedied by removing/replacing the item, nor by logging out and back in.
The only way (outside of having one of their staff manually edit your stat for you), is to gain a level. This seems to bring the stat back to what it was supposed to be. The item that caused the issue can be safely used after this step occurs.
3) Path special abilities & having to actually unlock ability slots by leveling. The former essentially takes some very familiar things from World of Warcraft (Summoning a mailbox or building a campfire anyone?) and puts it into this game. Lackluster to say the least, and I can see far too many players only using one or two Paths in this game because of how they stacked some of these abilities.
I don't even know a polite thing to say about having to unlock actual regular ability slots by leveling, given that you only get a limited amount to begin with, with no possibility of expanding the amount. It's like they took a page out of Guild Wars and then proceeded to slap Diablo 3 all over it. Not to mention, if you're a "gunslinger" type of DPS, you're absolutely pigeonholed into keeping your basic attack (aka weakest) in one of those precious slots due to high ability cooldown times.
Well, that's it folks. Hope the review was a bit informative in relaying my experience so far with Wildstar.
