I am very impressed with the depth of this game. There are so many skills/stats to choose from when building your character and all of them appear to be well thought out and have a noticeable impact on the game. Annoyed with some bandits being just fast enough to escape your wrath as you try and run them down? A few points in path-finding will help. Love battles but wish your followers would recover quicker? Some points in the First Aid and Surjery will do you nicely.

Depending on which nation your peasants come from will determine what they evolve into when they level up and building up/preserving your troops is great fun.

Combat is tough to start with and I confess to falling back to the bow while I get more used to melee. It is more definitely not mindless hack and slash and there is a real sense of accomplishment in gradually getting better. In addition to tournaments (you can bet on yourself if you are brave/good enough ;) ) there are arena fights to hone your skills as well as training grounds so you can try out different weapons and ways of fighting.

On the negative side I can say on my Mac Pro 4,1 (2.93Ghz, 16GB. Radeon 4870) I have had a few graphical glitches (occassional colour corruption) but a quick click on Save & Exit got me through those. Performance has been perfect on all max settings. The graphics themselves are a bit old now but more than good enough and I am still pleasantly surprised by the lighting in some of the halls, sky etc.

I've been playing now or about 15 hours and can see I have only scratched the surface.. you really can work your way up to running your own kingdom, help a warmongering noble start a war by burning down a few villages and leaving a few tokens to point the finger etc. It is great fun and I'm off to play some more! I'm still a long way from being king material :)