Well I'm done, took me 15 hours and except for the lack of a dao style ending where you could talk to your companions i really don't understand the negativity around awakening xD
I guess this is due to the fact that I dropped my hopes for the continuation and just went ahead and embraced the role of commander. The fights were more fun, if a tad easy. My main char died once in the final fight on nightmare, otherwise it was pretty easy. Not a single reload not due to crash xD
I suppose the negative points, for those that have yet to buy it would be:
- Continuation of your choices from origins is basically zero besides the king/queen decision
- It crashed 7 times (yes i counted

)
- Too easy, you can with some minor combat tactics adjustments skip using mana and health potions almost completely.
- the clarity and health skills make constitution and willpower useless for most characters. Without any extra points constitution and some from items my rogue was packing 400 hp and almost as much stamina. If it werent for the mass overwhelming enemies i couldve solo'd the game easily with the bastard xD
- The new uber sword wade can make for you can end up looking like starfang xD
- The ending epilogue comes somewhat surprisingly
- Runecrafting is mostly pointless unless you intend to solo the game and really need to make your character incredibly redicolously powerfull. If you don't have it on your main character you need to leave the throneroom (your camp equivalent from DAO) in order to craft runes and that is just plain annoying when the other skills posess so damn much more awesomeness.
And here some postive points:
+ Wade and herren are still pretty funny
+ Archery becomes the new uber class, making having more than 1 rogue in the party not completely retarded anymore
+ Awesome loot
+ The characters are quite interesting but in one playthrough you usually won't get all of them to very high approval so you will miss out on conversations if you do not walk through areas already cleared with the rest of the party to get to talk to them.
+ The new dualwielding skills and new rogue skills are bloody epic, and the little I have seen from the companions in the other classes was pretty neat too.
Ill stop for now my head is spinning, played from 10 am to 16pm without eating anything xD