So I played through a game as Franco-Iberia going Purity with a strong cultural slant. I played on Gemini (4th of 6 difficulty). Overall I really like it. And I don't think it is all that similar to civ5. Or at least, it's about as different from civ5 as civ5 is from civ4. So if you like Civ games in general, I would give this a recommendation.
BE gives an incredible amount of freedom to develop your civ. I don't know if all of the options are balanced, or if one or two really dominant strategies will emerge, but for right now, everything seems wide open. The tech web is incredibly daunting at first. And there are so many paths you can take. You can focus on just about any aspect of your civ through tech. This s further augmented by the quest system. You can take quests to boost one affinity. Most buildings have related quests which let you boost them in one of two ways. The affinities strongly influence the types of units and buildings you can make. And you aren't locked into one affinity. I had enough points in supremacy end game to make use of some of the unique supremacy stuff as well.
The aliens are a nice feature. I ran into some trouble just trying to wipe them out as they turned rather aggressive. I was a little disappointed that they became more or less irrelevant as the game went on.
The biggest problem seems to be the interface. While I do really like the artwork, there is often so little contrast that it makes things hard to see. Also a lot of the screen can get cluttered further exacerbating the problem. In particular, I remember having some trouble easily identifying my borders as the border color sort of blends into the background. And theres a lot of small quality of life improvements they need to make there.
The other problem I ran into is trade route management. I had over 20 trade routes, and it gets to be incredibly tedious to find their old routes again every 20 turns. There's no sort feature either which means I have to manually scroll through to find where it was going last or to find the highest gold or whatever.
One final problem, the AI seemed to be way way too passive. I'll try playing on a higher difficulty to see if that changes, but I don't think half the civs even bothered contacting me more than once or twice all game. And the same bad AI problems seem to persist from Civ5. I went to war once and the AI was just terrible at it. And then she wouldn't negotiate peace even though I was taking down city after city.
