Alright guys, I have been playing AION for a few days now and I am far from being eligible to give a review, but I would like to post a few "first" impressions, here we go:

PROs:

• Great graphics, both in design as well as animation, interesting and quirky monsters. Good Performance as well
  
• Good music, very atmospheric and diverse
• Amazing character customization, at least there will not be a clone wars feeling (dont know about the items yet)
• Combat is a bit more exciting than WOW, due to the "Skill Chains" (Skills that trigger the availability of other skills)
• Players can open up "private stores", which means they can pretty much sit down anywhere and offer their goods, which makes economy a bit more fun and lively
  

CONs:

• Quest Design: All quests are pure grinding quests, go and kill x monsters, am Level 15 and have not encountered a single quest that was different, gets very boring and you do not care about the story anymore
• Drop System: You do not find many interesting things from MOBs, all the good weapons come from quest rewards or auction house, which takes away some of the fun "hunting" for you gear
• Lots of bots and gold farmers around
• Powergames community, people refuse to group so they get more EXP soloing etc.
• The crafting system is polished but to linear, no recipe drops and you can basically craft whatever you want, when you want as long as you are willing to spend hours doing the same thing
• The ****s may be but do not look diverse and you cannot really tell a caster from a gladiator just by looking at it
• No playable races (all human)
• A lot of game functions (channels, godstones etc.) are not explained in the manual or tutorial
• Very linear world/story progression, you will never have the choice where to go, as the world is constructed linear (not like WOW, where you have multiple areas you could continue to level)