A sloppy, poorly-plotted mish mash of ideas and general superhero nonsense with no rhyme or reason for its existence. I can't believe this is a Bendis crossover event. I mean, he orchestrated two of my favorite crossovers in Marvel history: House of M and Secret Invasion. But this just feels like he accidentally wrote this while on painkillers or something. There's no structure, no clear setup, nothing to latch on to from the very start. Plot devices are set up left and right that never pay off. There are entire strands of this storyline that just vanish, never to return. The story keeps changing course over its ten issues, so much so that by the end, basically nothing has happened (except of course for a totally unearned Marvel-Universe-shattering event that I guess will affect further storylines down the pipe). 
 This whole thing is just plain confusing. So much so that I have a feeling it was not written as originally intended. The first clue is in the prelude, originally published in an issue of New Avengers a full 2 years before the actual Age of Ultron event debuted, even though it is an important part of the story. This makes me think there must have been a lot of delays and rewrites (and possibly publisher interference), causing this myriad of cascading problems that ultimately lead to one of the messiest Marvel stories I've ever read. 
 I mean, from moment one it is totally unclear what is going on. We get the fairly useless intro at the beginning of each issue which merely states: 
 "Hank Pym of the Avengers created the artificial intelligence known as Ultron. It hates humanity... And it has returned..." 
 Cool, great. So Ultron's back. That's literally all we get, but then we're shown this completely destroyed world where Ultron clearly already came back and wiped everything out, but then doesn't actually make an appearance himself. We just see that he's already won, and all of earth's heroes are utterly defeated. 
 Only, then we learn it's only been like a week since this happened. This isn't some alternate future where Ultron has reigned for years. It's a brand new circumstance. Yet for some reason, Captain America has collapsed into a pile of dirty laundry with no will to fight and everyone else has seemingly gone crazy and lost all ability to reason or make a plan. 
 Also, by just leaping full-on into this crazy world, we don't get any idea what kind of Marvel story we're looking at here. Is this an alternate reality? A possible future? Something that is currently actually happening to our heroes? Are all our heroes the same ones we know and love, or are they slightly different in this timeline? Is this even a different timeline? It's extremely confusing, I guess because they wanted the story to be so hard to follow that the ending would be "shocking." 
 But let me tell you, it ain't worth the struggle to get there. I kept waiting on someone, anyone to step forward and explain what happened in this world and what exactly the stakes are. Since I had no idea what steps Ultron had taken to conquer the world, I had no idea what he was capable of. Sometimes it seems like simply sneaking around with a hand over your face is enough to best his army of robots, whereas other times they seem nearly omniscient. By not knowing what Ultron can do, we don't know what to be afraid of as readers. There are no stakes, no rules. It's just a wacky story that of course involves a very lame time travel sidequest (it can't be a Certified Bad Marvel Crossover Event without time travel). 
 Anyway, I can't un-recommend this enough. As far as I can tell, the only real reason to be up on the events in this book involves a character later introduced in Guardians of the Galaxy and some shockwaves from the final issue that reach into the Marvel Universe's cosmic storylines. But, rest assured, those books will catch you up on the proceedings enough that you don't need to waste your time on this confusing mess.