I played it a bit with my gaming group. The character creation and classes are solid, and bring a lot of life to stuff. I like their new balance attempts (every stat caps at 20, AC isn't raised to infinity, etc) to keep it feeling like stuff that is dangerous stays dangerous and your character wouldn't become a god among men by level 9.
The change of spellcasting with the introduction of ritual spells (utility spells that, if you know but don't prepare, you can simple cast with a time consuming ritual instead, spells like Tenser's Floating Disk and such) was a nice touch. I like the changes to the Bard class, and Fighter has a clear and effective niche.
Only thing: when we played, there was no DM Guide and only a prewritten adventure. Don't play that adventure. It's very poorly written. In particular, there's a point where it sets up for your group of level 1 or 2 players to duel a level 4 half-dragon fighter in single combat, and have him one-shot a character and then leave (first taking the time to strike them while they're down, to make it more likely the player loses the character), and if you kill him, he literally just gets replaced by a differently colored version of himself.
Maybe it'd go better for you guys but for my group, it was a trainwreck (although the DM was bad, objectively, so that didn't help). If the DM guide is out now, or if you'd just wing it, the game is very worth trying out though.
