A good game as is, but could be perfect with a few months of bug fixes.
What I'm playing the game on: C2D E6400, 2GB 667 Ram, 7900GS video card
Current Class: Dark Templar - A tank that wears mail and can't use full plate armor, but makes up for it with various life leach and health drain spells and attacks. At level 20 I'm currently converting like 12% of my damage to health.
Stability:
So far I've been disconnected from the server because of lag one time. Maybe I've been lucky but I honestly got disconnected more and experienced more lag spikes on WoW. Don't get me wrong, it is not without bugs. However, most of them that I've found have not effected gameplay at all. For instance, some mobs I've noticed might move towards you without moving their legs, or other similar graphical bugs. I don't find them to be to big of a deal. The only bug I've come across now that has effected gameplay is that sometimes it allows me to get 2x buffs from frenzy stance (+50% damage given +50% damage taken -100% chance dodge). Multiply that by two and I die in under 5 seconds. This has happened twice now from the time I got frenzy stance at lvl 15 until now (lvl 25). If you don't stance dance though this isn't an issue. Apparantly, any buff that should overwrite another (battle stances, auras, etc...) can on occasionaly stack with the buff its supposed to overwrite. Hopefully this bug will be fixed soon since I like to change from frenzy to defensive stance in the middle of combat quite often.
Graphics:
Just because you can run WoW on high, doesn't mean you should try it with AoC. From what I've seen, its slightly more of a resource hog than CoD4. I play CoD4 on medium settings and I play AoC on low settings and get about the same frame rates (45ish). That being said, even on low, they are far better than any other RPG I've seen. I can run it on medium settings, but the results are somewhat choppy (15-20 fps).
Gameplay:
Although the combat is different, it isn't incredibly different. Basically, to use melee skills, you must complete a combo attack. However, it isn't like street fighter where you can expect combos to be 8 buttons long that you have to memorize. I haven't gotten any combos longer than 3 button presses yet at level 25. I think the longest combos are like 5 button presses and all the buttons show up on the screen and you have plenty of time to press them. Furthermore, enemies have strong sides and week sides and you have 3 regular attacks. Attacking the weak side does about 3 times as much damage as a strong side. It doesn't take long to get used to but I can tell that there is much more room for skill to develop than there is in WoW.
Quests:
The initial quests (lvl 1-20) take 2 forms, daytime and nighttime. The daytime quests are multiplayer quests. However, I didn't find any quests that take more than 2 players to complete. I had to group for a few bosses but generally you can clear the way to the bosses solo and most bosses you can solo. There are also nighttime quests, or destiny quests. These quests are more lore focused and take place in single player mode in which you are basically in an instance all by yourself. The storyline is told through these quests and I can say that it is incredibly interesting. I haven't done much after leaving the initial city at lvl 20 yet to really speak on that other than just to say that after lvl 20, you are thrown into a more traditional MMO setting where day moves to night in real time, and you are stuck in multiplayer mode.
The Bads:
Instancing kind of sucks, but honestly I don't think its as bad as many people made it out to be. Basically, on one server, there are multiple instances of the same zones. Each instance holds x amount of people before another instance is created. I kind of like it because it alleviates that need for instantly respawning mobs when you're questing. I despise some of the mobs in that zone in hellfire Peninsula near kazzak in World of Warcraft. You kill 5 mobs and barely survive, only to have 2 more respawn instantly. Secondly, its not like only 5 people are allowed per instance. I don't know what the limits are but from what I've seen I'm guessing 25+.
The next somewhat bad thing about the game is load screens. They are incredibly common but most take less than 10 seconds on my PC and the very large zones seem to take slightly longer (15-20 seconds).
Installation: Some people I've talked to said it took them 2days + to install and download patches. For me it took 3 hours. Total space on hard drive = 30gb so you may have to clear off some of the porn on your drive. Don't worry though, you can always create a female character to you're liking and run around bare chested.
Balance: I played a Necromancer to level 10, and found that I could do as much damage with my staff as I could with my spells. If I found this within my first few hours of the game I only assume that necro isn't the only class that's screwed up.
Lack of Polish: You'll notice early on that things could run more smoothly in the game than they do. However I don't really see it as an issue. I just look at the fact that I played WoW for 18 months, and I still go backwards whenever there is the tiniest pebble in front of me when I use blink. Since launch funcom has cranked out one major bug fix patch and is soon to release another. Not bad for 2 weeks work IMO. The areas above level 20 are slightly more buggy than Tortage (the initial zone) is.
Overall:
This is the best MMO I've ever seen other than WoW. If you've got a computer as good or better than mine, and you're tired of the same daily quests and same four BG's, I would highly suggest giving it a try. I have no idea if I'll keep playing it when WotLK comes out this winter, but for now, its far better than impaling the emisary of hate for the 86th time.
Overall Score 8.0 / 10
-.5 for various graphical bugs
-1 for gameplay bugs
-.5 interface is crap
-.5 for class balance issues
+.5 for boobs