An awesome game that should not be overlooked despite its flaws.
Visually, the game is one of the best of the PS2/GCN/Xbox generation. In terms of graphics alone its one of the best looking game on the original Xbox. It has high amounts of shine and a surprisingly high amount of textures. Everything is pretty well detailed. While the world isn't as open ended as I had hoped it would be, it still has the long draw distance that you would want it to have had it been more open ended. In other words, its a very impressive game for its time. In terms of artistic design, it fairly unique. Its kind of how you'd want a fairy tale based game to look. I like ti a lot, and it brings you into the game's style very well.
The soundtrack is surprisingly good. Its very light hearted for most of the game, but it gets pretty epic and loud during boss fights. It also switches into a sort of dangerous sounding theme when you're near enemies. Its not the best music I've heard in a game, but it works pretty well and reacts to what's going on in the game world.
Game-play is always the core of the game, if the game-play is broken, the rest of the game might as well be nonexistent. Lucky for us, this game rocks. I know its not as open ended as promised, and there's a couple other minor broken promises, but overall its very cool and fun to play. The thing that stands out most to me is that depending on the way you play, your character becomes good or evil. The more evil you play, the more evil you look, you start to grow horns, become very pale, and you develop a sort of red glow. Likewise, if you play like a saint, you look like one. People also react to you differently depending on how evil or good you look. The ending of the game is also different depending on if you're good or evil. The combat is fun, simple and responsive. Being able to just fly between melee and spells mid-fight is awesome. I consider the combat to be mostly balanced, except that the ranged weapons are kind of useless. The story is fairly predictable, but its not a bad one either. Character customization goes beyond good and evil, you can choose tattoos, hair styles, beards, clothes, weapons, and more. There's a lot of different weapons that you can augment, including secret ones you usually have to do separate quests for. Which brings me to the side quests, there are lots of side quests, and it makes the game last much longer if you do them. There's some awesome game-play to be found here.
Just an overall awesome game if you have an Xbox, Xbox 360, or PC and you give it the chance it deserves. Peter Moleneux may be a little overly ambitious, but the game still turned out great.