[alexo]

Background: I used to play and DM a 2nd edition ages ago, currently reading the 4th edition books because the kids want to play.

While the original review is a bit jumbled, I believe that I understand the reviewer's points (and agree with some of them to a certain degree).

He suggests, and I concur, that the D&D 4ed experience is skewed toward combat encounters. In particular, the introduction of healing surges and at-will and encounter powers allow the party to fully regenerate after a fight and therefore have less incentive to consider other options.
Contrast that with what I remember from the 2nd ed. where normal healing rate was 1HP/day and even with Clerics selecting nothing but "cure ... wounds" spells, it may take game days to restore a party to full health.

One way for a DM to tackle it may be to concentrate on healing surges (rather than HPs) as an exhaustible resource but that only provides a one day (game time) reprieve. Seems very hard (if not outright impossible) to have the party in a weakened state for an extended period of time to have them either find ways to avoid combat altogether of devise clever solutions to end it quickly.

While I haven't played it yet (I intend to next week), I get the distinct feeling that the system has moved in the direction of video games.

Similarly, the available powers are mostly useful in combat situation and the rules and descriptions also favour it. I can appreciate the situation where an inexperienced DM would feel uncertain about handling non-combat aspects, mainly due to extensive hand-holding the system offers in the former case versus a lack of it in the later.

Whether this is a good thing or a bad one depends on your preferences. I intend to try it, knowing in advance that my "old" style of running a game will not work with its rules. We'll see how it goes.

Regards,
Alex.