Wizardry, a hardcore MMO which consist of : Very heavy grinding, frustrating control system and ganking (PK).
The game has a simple outlay - a town, a storyline embedded with cut-scenes and various dungeons. Needless to say, you search for party, buy or sell your items via a player shop or the NPC auctioneer in town. The most interesting aspect of this game is possibly its class changing system. To keep it simple, you basically could bring a number of skills to another class, such as a fighter to priest so the priest could inherit some of the fighter's abilities. You will have a fixed amount of skill points quota based on your soul level, but could change class as many times as you like. It makes the game system a bit interesting. The game itself has an open PK ( player killing ) system. "Criminal" is the term used in this game for the PKers, who could steal your loots so watch your back, that applies to criminals as well as they could also kill each other. However, the higher Soul Rank players will usually have a major advantage. One of the reasons why this game has put off newcomers is because the high level can gank lower level with ease. The gap between them is just too huge to be overcome.
The game difficulty is quite high, as expected from a game which encourages party play. It's not made for solo lovers, even though you could potentially still solo some of the stuff, if you are patient enough. At first, you just need to follow the storyline and could solo most of the mobs. As you progress, party play will become more important, and in some cases, a necessity for boss fight. Later on, the gameplay is pretty much stalled as most players just farm in dungeon repeatedly just like most MMOs out there.
This game is time intensive; very time consuming in fact. Starting from level 16 or so, the amount of experience needed to advance is ridiculous. The latency problems don't help either - rubberbanding during the heat of a battle in a hardcore MMO like this is far from desirable. Furthermore, the control / targeting system is so clumsy which is, sometimes, you just want to smash keyboard... there aren't many games which makes the targeting this frustrating but Wizardry has managed to do it.
Despite being free to play, if you want to excel in this game, investment is recommended. Cash shop items such as high grade potions, skill reset, and many great goods are only available in the Royal Shop ( cash shop ), and almost all of them cannot be traded or mailed. Of course, you could always rely on wiki and a good guild to make up for the differences between cash and free users. Being a cash shop user myself, I honestly admit the royal shop has helped me a great deal so far. It isn't a must but the stuff from there will come in handy. However, some adjustment on the prices are needed in my opinion since most of them are overpriced.
As the game is new, technical issues are common. You will encounter all sort of weird bugs that could kill you whether in or out of battle. The latency is far from good either. For example, your weapon could swing and juggle in the air many times but still fail to hit the monster. Furthermore, the item drop rate in this game is also quite low, if you do plan to play, keep yourself mentally prepared.
Basically, you need two essential elements to really do well in this game - GREAT amount of time and a good party or guild. Cash shopping is optional but is quite crucial for many situations, though, watch your wallet go thin in no time. In my opinion, this game targets a certain group of audience who loves to grind in hard way, the term of "niche" is probably the closest thing I could think of to describe their marketing so far.
***Edited review: After playing it casually for about four months, SOE hasn't done that a great job. In fact, since population started dropping, party has become harder to come by. There are more cash shop items but compared to the japanese version, the global version is a rip off. The latency problem seems to have improved but partly due to a drop in population; SOE pretty much have done nothing about it. I'm a big fan of SOE but they've let me down with this frustrating Wizardry Online. Getting a party for progression has become such a rarity now that in order to do so, you must either have friends to play with or have some very nice peeps to actually help you for free. If you have neither one of them, then best of luck to you...***
***EDIT ( Aug 2013 ): Party for progression has become even rarer than ever. The minority of the players who have completed the contents will keep asking for new contents to be released. However the majority of the players who're unable to progress due to the lack of party or help will be stuck forever unless they miraculously found a party. The latency is actually getting WORSE from my last edit. Lots of rubberbanding happening and as the control system is already clumsy and frustrating, adding a bit of lag is really the least anyone wants. A lot of the issues are actually down to the Japanese develper Gamepot, their coding cause a lot of unncessary position lag and frustrating control. My conclusion so far is this Gamepot company is really giving the famous Wizardry Online a bad name; it's almost an insult.***