The Good
The book is beautiful, the illustrations are literally awesome. The game is substantially simpler than previous games Monte Cook has written for. There are great design ideas within Numenera. Building blocks of the roleplaying experience, such as connections between characters and character hooks into the campaign are worked into character creation, giving the GM a break from having to figure all that stuff up himself. The rules cover a wide range of situations. The setting is pretty cool and original. I really like how the core book really contains everything you need to play. There are also great tips on running a roleplaying game and game design that are very useful and incredibly insightful regardless of game system.

The Bad
Even if simpler than other systems, some subsystems of the game are still too complex for my taste. Still too much emphasis and work is given to the GM in my opinion. Seems to me that Numenera could have been an easier game to GM. Of course, in the end that will depend on the GM himself but that is the general feel I get from reading the book and the suggested style of play. Ironically, Monte says this is not what he means to do with the game—and he succeeds in many places—but the rules say otherwise in others. The game succeeds in telling you how you should play Numenera (or any good roleplaying game for that matter) but the rules don’t make this style of play all that obvious most of the time and the onus of “encouraging” this style on all players falls on the GM.

The Fuzzy
I can’t decide whether players making all the rolls is a good or a bad thing, since it does make it an easier job for the GM but it also takes all the dice-rolling fun with it. GMs are players too and they should be entitled to rolling dice simply because it’s part of the game and it’s fun. I’m afraid it may make GMing seem more of a chore and the GM more liable for his “intrusions” than fate itself when dice are rolled instead. I get why “intrusions” are important and I think they’re brilliant in concept, it’s their implementation I’m not entirely sure of. The game’s open-endedness is also a fuzzy area for me, it’s good because it promotes creativity but at the same time creates more work for the GM in the game-balance department.

The Ugly
The book could be better edited, the same explanation is repeated in many places, sometimes in the very next paragraph. The text feels likes a rough draft sometimes, lacks cohesion, with design notes seeming to leak into the final product. Some descriptions are clearly written with a D&D player in mind, telling the reader what Numenera is not when compared to “other games”, and how rules in this game differ from rules in “other games”, often ending up in Monte-rants (which I agree with by the way, I just think they belong elsewhere, not in a game’s core book). Some descriptions should not even be there at all (such as explaining what a deaf or blind character is). It could have been a much shorter product if it were better edited. Less is more.

Conclusion
I think conceptually the game is in a really good place, some of Monte’s ideas I feel though, don’t quite translate as well to the game. Sometimes Monte himself tells us what his game concept is in a side note for a particular rule or “the advantages of the system” (which begs the question: the advantage as opposed to what? the answer probably being the regular d20 system). But the game should show, not tell. Regardless, the setting is really something and Numenera is definitely a step forward in roleplaying games and useful for roleplayers in general, whether you’re playing Numenera or something else entirely.
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First off, this is a great rulebook in several ways. It's very pretty for one, and it's also got some of the best organisation I can remember seeing. Cross-references about, text is marked in colour to highlight key terms, and the margins are full of, essentially, Cook's scribbled notes giving throwaway ideas or little details that aren't crucial to the main passage. It's easy to navigate through and to read, and the illustrations are good too.

Numenera is a strange fish, and my opinion of it as a game is rather split. On the one hand, I'm intrigued by this game and its world, both from reading it and from my other exposure to it. On the other hand, I really don't feel I could confidently run a game in this setting, because I don't have a holistic grasp of the world. The main reason for the book's size is that Cook has included a sprawling gazetteer of the world, covering in detail dozens of cities, towns, mountains, ruins, forests and their inhabitants. Although reading through the details got rather dry (in fairness, it's not a novel, it's a roleplaying tool), most of it was creative and full of attractive strangeness. The problem is that the very strangeness and disjointedness that Cook emphasises makes it nigh-impossible for me to think how I'd fill in the blanks between, let alone come up with my own content. I now realise that including all that detail wasn't just the urge to get his creation down on paper, but a bit of a necessity.

I think it's a real problem of this kind of setting, but being made of the scraps of previous civilisations creates a lot of incoherence. Neighbouring settlements may be completely different, the rules of physics can change, the technology level of places and objects varies wildly. Ecology is affected too, just a random assortment of entities. The problem is that, for me, the lack of obvious connections makes it hard to extrapolate.

I'd like to play more of this game, but I can't see myself running it. ( )

This is a beautiful system for role playing and really lends itself well to story telling and seamless roleplaying, especially for the GM. My players really enjoy this gaming system. ( )

The Dying Earth without the poetry, and Gamma World without the humor. A playable system, but nothing outstanding. The illustrations are pretty, though. ( )