This book, more than any other book seems to polarize my GR buddies. I don't know many people who sit on the fence with this book. At one end of the scale you have "my favourite series, this is amazing" and at the other end; "you'll remember your time having gastro more favourably than this book". 
 Me, I am going to come down off the fence on the side of the like-sters. 
 I am not sure where the bad rep comes from, I have read far far worse than this, I have also read far better, but for a first in the series, I think that it has set a pretty good scene for the next two books. 
 The world building is ok, pretty generic world, nothing really any different from most fantasy books. Kind of an old empire style with walled towns, horse travel, deserts, seas and your standard earth gravity. 
 The characters are numerous and have difficult to remember and pronounce names, sometimes I think Bakker just made them weird to add spice to the story, but after reading the entire book I found a pronunciation guide at the back. Which meant i had to review the way i had a name in my head. The characters themselves are pretty good, there is a lot of familiarity in them, I feel like I have read them before, in previous lives they might have been in First Law or Mistborn etc but overall they are developing along nicely. There are a couple of them that are very good and I have really enjoyed the interaction between certain people. It seems the more bizarre the character the better Bakker writes them. Unless the character is female. So far the female characters amount to nothing. We only have one major-ish female role and whilst it focuses a lot on her thoughts and feelings, she is about as predictable at me not being able to spell the name of the next tribe we will meet. 
 There a lot of factions, tribes, leaders, languages, religions, sourceres and none of them are Smith from Jonesville. I think this does cause a lot of problems with some readers as it does take a bit of work putting it all together. I also think that if you have read big epics with many cahracters and lands you are probably in a better place to accept that and stick with the story. 
 Overall I am pretty happy with what I have read so far, I do feel this is a set up book and I am expecting a lot more from book two. The potential is certainly there and I'll be going to book two very soon.