So I preordered this and have played it a little over the few days I've had it. I figured I would organize my thoughts cohesively.
Side note - I do not claim to be good at this game. I do, however, play a lot of video games and figured I had at least a little knowledge to break this down with.
Graphics
I've played the beta and the graphics are really bad to the point that you can't tell the board's state unless you focus hard on individual units, and even then footmen and knights are still hard to distinguish.
As noted by jasongraph, it is difficult to see what units are in what area. I've gotten used to it, but it is still hard to see what's in an area.
There is the inclusion of a 'Strategic View' which offers an overview of the whole board including area control and area strengths.
Personally, I don't think that the graphics are 'bad', per say, I think that they're just too game-y. This is a board game, not a video game, and I think the inclusion of an optional setting to have physical game pieces (such as when playing on TTS) would be nice.
The art is quite nice, and the housecard images are zoomed in a bit. Still not sure if I like that.
Performance
I have a crappy W10 laptop and the game runs beautifully on high graphics. There is almost no stutter and I think that the game could be run on almost any machine.
On low graphics, the shadows are terrible. I played with low graphics for about 5 minutes before switching.
Content
It has the main game (including MoD vassals & optional ToB), 3 different AI levels, and a series of challenges with different win conditions. At the time of writing, there are no challenges for Stark & Martell, but 2-3 for each of the other Houses.
Disclaimer: As stated above, I am terrible at this game.
[Disclaimer over]
When all the AI are on easy, I don't find the game to be very difficult (although I haven't won as Tyrell yet). Medium is a good challenge, and I haven't touched Hard Ai yet.
I've noticed that Stark always seems to get crushed, as Baratheon almost always seems to go after the North instead of Martell/land. Between Greyjoy and Baratheon, Stark has finished all the games I played (unless I was playing as Stark) with no more than 2 castles.
There is theoretically a chat, although I haven't played any online games yet so I don't know quite how it works. You can make alliances with other players and request support from them, and it works how it would at the table (i.e., other players know you have an alliance but they don't know the terms). You can also warn of threats that other players pose.
I hope that they start to add the expansions (even as paid DLC), as otherwise, I don't think the game has enough to last.
The game has a tutorial. It's not quite as good as the FFG tutorial, but it does a good job of introducing players to the game as well as the digital version. It took me about 30 minutes(I did it just to familiarize myself with the program), but I wasn't entirely focused.
There's achievements as well, which I don't think are too hard to get. It is a bit of an incentive to keep playing, but I'd love if they added more.
Interface
The interface is clean and smooth. Turn order/wildlings at the top, current action at the bottom, influence tracks on the bottom right, player stats on the left. Everything can be found quickly, and organized/subdivided rules can be found in the pause menu.
One thing I don't like is that you can't see who you have an alliance with without going into the alliance menu and scrolling until you find it. This means that a player could sometimes forget who they've allied with and accidentally break it.
Also, warning of a threat counts as breaking an alliance. I do think that's kind of dumb, but I see why. AI, though, don't break alliances when they warn of threats. That is really annoying.
Conclusion
There's barely any players online at any given time, and only a few games open at a time. Granted, the game's only been out a few days, but so far I don't think the game will survive.
The game look nice, even if it can be hard to take stock of things, and runs well. There's some content, but I think the DLCs will need to be added to pad it out. The UI is clean and easy to use, and the AI is pretty good.
tl;dr, I think that it's worth what I paid ($15.99), but a little lacking in content and graphics that are a bit too game-y for my tastes.
Anyone else have any thoughts?