This is a really great mmo, and you don't have to pay a monthly fee to enjoy it.
1. Graphics and art style. The graphics are actually surprisingly good if you can run the game with full settings. You also get used to the almost asian inspired art style for the human characters. It's teeter totter here in terms of style and sometimes thing's don't really blend as well as they could have. You get used to it though and it doesn't really bother me that much.
2. Sound. The sound is quite good but they still have a few bugs to sort out.
3. Controls. Controls are just like any other mmo these days, however the targeting system (TAB key) seems to have a range limit even though you would be able to attack something farther than it would have cycled to. This is actually a pretty big problem.
4. Balance. The game is still an infant stage considering it was just released, so there are canyons of room here where they need to fix things. Especially for the necromancer profression. It seems the profression I rolled, the necromancer (oh the irony) seems to be the least effective class in terms of pretty much everything compared to the other profressions in the game at the moment and their (skill tree) trait tree doesn't make much sense at all in terms of building a balanced character. Even the devs admited that the class needs help. So on that note, I view this games balance a bit more negatively than someone else would.
5. Crafting. The crafting in this game is easy once you actually figure out how it works. It comes with an unconventional discovery system where you can actually discover new recipes on your own. The problem with this system is that it's the only affective way to actually level crafting; so if you're a newb and are just learning about it while playing, it can be rather annoying once you realize this and waste tons of mats. The other thing that fails short here is the lack of things you can actually discover and create that are apart from the norm.
6. This game has no monthly fee right? No, but yes if you're not very intelligent lol. The thing here is, they try to pin you into certain corners where you would want to give them money. There is an actual real money cash shop in the game in the form of a menu that you can access at any time. Basically it uses a gem system, much like APB (now known as APB:Reloaded). For an example of this, your bank inventory doesn't come with much space at all. The ONLY way to upgrade this space, is with 600 gems. Which is like 10 dollars or something at the moment. However you can get around this by converting 1 ingame currency (gold) into 600 gems or whatever the current going rate for them is. So you can bypass their intentional hindrances if you have the patience for it and the in-game currency for it. The same thing basically goes for the characters inventory, you can unlock more bag slots with gems. There's also consumable items you can buy with gems such as a crafting booster, which you buy with gems then use it once on your character for a 1 hour long crafting leveling boost.
At first it seems like the game is sort of throwing you under the bus and wants you to use this cash menu a lot, but it's just the first 10 or 15 levels. Once you figure the system out you can pretty much ignore it entirely if you wanted to.
7. PvE. PVE in this game is great. You basically do not need to create a party at all when doing normal activities in the world. Everyone can participate in the same activity or quest for lack of a better term, and get their own loot drops and won't be hindranced by other players at all. So if you are a solo player this is an ideal system, or if you're someone that gets enraged that another player isn't helping you, or is making life difficult by stealing your quest items.... well thats just impossible for that to happen in this game.
There are a couple of misteps here however nearing endgame. Basically there are only a handful of 5man dungeons in this game. Thats it, there are no 10 mans or higher currently. The other thing is that it works like WoW's heroic token system way back in BC (haven't played wow since then). You do a dungeon on explorer mode (basically heroic mode) and you will get tokens that you can use to buy gear. The problem here is that you need to grind for a ridiculous amount of these tokens to get gear, and each dungeon offers a different type of token, for more or less the same gear. Only, this gear may be better for certain profressions in the game than others. So in that regard imho it fails because it's splitting certain profressions (classes) away from each other for really no reason; and it's grindy, like... asian gold farmer grindy. Like.. diablo 3 grindy. Also, there's no 10mans like I mentioned. Also, a lot of the dungeons have some fatal bugs in them that prevent you from progressing in them. How those passed testing I have no idea.
8. PVP is great in this game. the world vs world vs world, or server vs server is really epic and offers large huge battles. There's also structured pvp with is basically 8v8 arena mode which is also fun. They also have a tournament mode but I haven't tried that yet but I'm pretty sure it's just arena mode.
Like I said before though balance is an issue in this game right now and there's a lot of work that needs to be done still.
all in all it's good, it's probably a little too good, because the flaws stand out a lot more since everything else is top notch. Overall in it's current state I would give it a 7.5 to be honest with you.
(there's also an AH in this game)