I've played a few hours.
I'm not sure whether I enjoy it or not. Then again, I did kinda get bored of PoE about halfway through because of the same reasons as Retropunch and lolcats. This is kinda the same, though to its credit I find the subject matters to be far more relatable than PoE's caustic gibberish. Here's it's a shittonne of words as well, but about stuff like general politics and wartime agendas. So more relatable stuff instead of some kind of supernatural completely fabricated lunacy.
The combat is still boring as all fuck. I don't understand why Obsidian is so insistent of having such stilted and stupid "waiting periods" between attacks. At least the AI in this one works so you don't have to babysit your characters as much as the release version of PoE. You've still got a lot of the MMO-style wail-at-the-air-while-numbers-float-around combat that most of the other Unity engine isometric games have. I heavily despise it.
The decisions and thought you have to put into your choices are good though. I'd say this is around the Witcher 3 level, but with more gravitas. I highly recommend you take the conquest rout of your character creation seriously, as it makes your experience very tailored to you. To give you an example, I'm basically called Queenslayer by every single person in this game because of what I did in there. It's glorious. All the enemies hate me immediately because of it and every single soldier knows who I am. There are a lot of choices and actions in the conquest section, so I can imagine how much work they must have put to add all the variety.
Mmm... other than that it's basically just PoE but with a different skin. The character customization is the same boring, almost-no-customization-at-all shit as PoE. You know, the one where you have to choose a premade portrait. Your companions all have an obscene amount of writing put into them, same like PoE. Maps are pretty but linear and in terms of actual shit to do in them, they're kinda limited. I'm not a fan of the time limit, just like I wasn't a fan of it in Fallout 1.
I think, at the end of the day, I'm just not a fan of these Obsidian Unity Engine Isometric games. There's something about these style that really annoys me and I'm not sure why. It's not like I dislike isometric games since I am a big fan of the Fallouts, Tactics, Divinity Original Sin and so on. There's just something about these ones that just pisses me off. Maybe it's the UI or the lack of customization, or the shitty combat or whatever.
In any case, that's all I have to say on it really. I'm not sure if I'm gonna continue playing. Not really compelled into it. I mean, the plot is interesting but I'm kinda like at when I was reading the Simillarion. I'm REALLY hesitant to force myself to read all this text, even if I know the text is interesting. Your mileage may vary.