Easy to play, the EMG pickups maintain note clarity even with massive distortion, very little noise at any gain level, comfortability factor is very high. Basically, if you're at all into the heaviest forms of Metal, you're probably going to love this.
This is a guitar that is meant mainly for massively distorted heavy metal playing, and of course that means you should buy it expressly for that purpose. If you are looking to jam along to your Beatles records, or even much of the Led Zeppelin catalogue, look very very far away. String control can be an issue, tone-wise it's a bit high end and can sometimes comes across screechy past the 12th fret. The tremolo arm isn't particularly good for anything but wild stuff, needs adjustment.
If you're looking to play anything extreme in metal: Thrash, Black, Death, or even the extreme side of the Doom and Shred genres, you probably want this monster. I've dusted off my old solid state 15w Crate and ran the guitar both with my Amptweaker Tightmetal pedal and without, and the sound from both clean and dirty perspectives is excellent: crisp and defined. In fact, to be blunt this guitar sounds way better than an $800 price tag should allow. Though I'm finding a place for the JRV Icon in my own recordings, I would especially reccomend this for live playing, it is sleek and wonderfully comfortable, and the minimal controls really make it simple to deal with. You don't have to think to much with this guitar, plug it in, adjust the volume, and you're there. And you can trust the sound to be consistently good, the EMG 81 really kicks ass. To qualify the "cons" portion of this review: string control can be an issue, but this is coming from someone that is switching from a guitar brand (Fender Classic Strat) used for nearly 7 years. There's a little too much high end for me, but again this is coming from someone who hasn't played through humbuckers since 2005. The Floyd Rose unit is great for keeping tune, including for the wild divebombs and other exaggeratory manipulations. However, this needed adjustment too as I like to have more subtletly and tightness in my tremolo. I rate this a 5 for anyone that plays the heavier side of metal. For people that live solely for the 60s and 70s Dino sound and style I give it a solid 4. Overall 4.5.