Disappointing implementation of a great concept
First of all, if you have Windows XP, you should know that the game only starts up about 1 in every 10 or 15 tries. So expect to sit there for about 5 minutes just before you get it loaded. Then if you've gotten to the middle of level 2 or so, you'll wait another minute as it auto-loads your last auto-save. Then another minute to load the game you want to play. Peter Molyneux (the head designer) admitted in an interview that the game-save feature was kinda rushed in at the last minute, and boy is he right!
Then once you actually get in the game you'll be faced with other annoyances. For example, there's a little side-quest where you're supposed to find a wolf and a piece of your creature's poop and put it in a ring of mushrooms and cast a shield over it all. Brownie points here for imagination! But unfortunately it's irreversibly bugged. About half of the wolves are actually labelled internally as some other animal, and half of the pieces of poop lose their "object" status when dropped and become a permanent part of the landscape. So if you get unlucky and get a defective wolf or poo and cast the shield over it, you fail the quest and are unable to try again. Unless, that is, you spent a minute saving the game just beforehand and are willing to spend another minute loading it back and trying the whole thing again... several times.
The simple action of dropping a villager or item somewhere is dangerous. For some reason, if you accidentally drop a villager on a house or another villager or a rock or whatever (which will happen all the time if you're not zooming way in to micro-manage), it will often go flying off the screen and die!!! Now that is just ridiculous.
The designers just plain forgot to implement a bunch of stuff. The best food for your creature to eat is fish. But fish is not labelled correctly in the game code as "food," so that when you finally get him to eat it and then reward him for it, your reward is only "From now on your creature will get hungrier when it is tired." No! That's not what I wanted to reward it for! Tough luck, because only cows and sheep and horses give you "From now on your creature will eat that type of food more often."
The open-ended nature of the game is cool, but it has maddening side effects too. If you manage to be sneaky and take over a faraway village before it's "natural," then it will break one of the other side quests.
Well, it was fun for a while here and there, but I really wish it was given a lot more time for testing. As it is, it's just more trouble than it's worth.