More like NWN than Dragon Age
I pretty much dived into the game face-first and encountered little, if any, problems. Had a harder time figuring out HOW to use the interface than finding out what skill does what and how it does it exactly. Protip, rightclicking on any skill brings up a brief description, not to mention that merely mouseovering it automatically highlights the character stats it rolls against. The game isn't all about AD&D-style number crunching - it's nice to look at, nearly on par with Dragon Age. Everything about your party is grouped nicely in separate tabs in your journal - from quest logs to inventory to talents.
However, the game isn't as polished as Dragon Age though - don't expect relationships or romancing, you get the standard "find about character X's story" snippets here and there, with the occasional voice-overed banter dialog, and that's it. Just like every other RPG does, other than Bioware's games, that is.
Combat shows the game's turn-based roots - even if you don't enable the autopause. If you move a character around it won't automatically attack a target when you finally select one until the next round starts. Rounds resolve fast enough but the characters' pauses while they wait for some invisible turn flag is noticeable. Characters also don't have any AI at all, they will automatically beat on their target with their weapon unless you directly intervene by getting them to use a talent, cast a spell, etc. This means it is desireable to get your mage a ranged weapon, although the fairly easy to get armor self-buff allows most caster types to safely melee (successfully inflicting damage is another story, as you will obviously need to get them skill in a weapon as well).
Magic users are at a disadvantage though; the game lost like 2/3rds of the pen-and-paper talents/spells in the transition to video game format, and it shows. In the traditional format magic was more flexible, the more combat-oriented nature of the computer game forced this unfortunate purging. As a result, you're left with a handful of while still useful spells, often take a while to cast, inevitably rendering magic mostly useful as pre-combat buffing. By the time you manage to get a damage spell off usually the target has either been incapacitated by your melee party members, or you do succeed in casting it and are left without any mana to cast anything else. That's another complaint, the mana pools are tiny.
This goes in line with the health points ("vitality") though - the Drakensang system isn't like AD&D, you don't get automatic stat increases as you level up. You have to spend the experience points you learn by investing them in talents (cheap at first, but expensive at higher skill levels) or investing them directly in stats (horribly expensive, and you gain more from increasing a talent at first). You also spend these points to increase your vitality, so it's entirely possible to ignore this which results in a level 10 character having the same amount of vitality as a level 1 character.
Not a problem if you know what you're doing, of course - e.g. spending those points on much-needed range attack skills for example, so that you won't be in melee range in the first place. There's still quite a bit of give in what talents are available to your characters, and experience is plentiful enough that you have a fairly generous margin in determining what to spend where.
Overall though the game's pen-and-paper roots do make themselves felt - this isn't Dragon Age where you can simply blunder around and wield whatever gear has the "highest numbers". You do have to pay attention to your characters' growth because the experience points you get, while plentiful, are far too easily spent if you spread yourself thinly, which is not a good idea. The game works best in your favour if you concentrate skills, for example making one guy the assigned "party thief" and only investing in pickpocket and lockpicking skills for that character. There are no party-combined skill levels, so you won't benefit from two characters with mediocre skill levels - you only benefit from high skill levels on individuals.
Before I knew it I was sucked into the game, despite the storyline not exactly being a shining example of originality. It's just nice to play an old-schoolish RPG in the vein of NWN but one that doesn't look dated. Fans of more accessible RPGs like Dragon Age may be put off by the heavy stat reliance in the game, but it isn't that bad as has been made out to be.
It's strongly recommended that you pick up that fan fixpack though, Ergo's fixpack, last version 1.80 - he fixes some bugs like assigning correct talents to classes and making all items actually droppable (original game was bugged to not ever drop some). There's also a mod that increases that party's running speed, which is really useful since the original game's characters' speed was ludicrously slow - and given that there is a LOT of walking around to do, may have contributed to the tedium complained by some.