In short: Pretty standard Alan Patrick fare. Super deep in lore, an overall interesting concept, but incredibly poorly written and editted, and the prescribed 4 hours bares no resemblance to what you should expect, if you don't want to hand wave over things.

To put this out there, up front: Do not run this, if you do not also have DDAL00-01, and have read it. Just don't.

Notably bad editing/design: The entire final part. The objective is to destroy/deactivate the MacGuffin, within 10 rounds, before the MacGuffin Owner returns and wipes the players from the face of existence. Sure, that's fine, sounds reasonable. Problem is - there are no stats for the MacGuffin, nor any mechanics about it whatsoever. The defender of the MacGuffin has stats, and is a reasonably challenging encounter for T4 characters. Problem is - he's not the objective. There is one option listed as a suggestion as to how to destroy the MacGuffin - but absolutely nothing about how that works, why it works, or how effective any given thing attempting to take advantage of it may be.

There is an appendix that lists the former abilities of this MacGuffin - but those stats are for what it used to be - its already deactivated. Of course, the players, nor (apparently) the second oldest creature on Toril is aware of that, and are told repeatedly to focus on stopping it. Yeah, just... Seriously, get someone else to edit this. No one should ever be allowed to edit their own work for publication.

Before I start, I'll make the caveat that I understand that AL adventures are short-form, and so some concessions need to be made to practicalities of running in limited time frames and the like.

That being said, this adventure suffers from what is, in my opinion, the greatest sin a DM or adventure writer can commit. Rule #1 of DMing, in my opinion, is to never remove your players' agency. The entire first act of this adventure does exactly that, and the rest of the adventure falls flat because of it.

From this point on, the review contains spoilers.

The action begins with the party in an inn, and there is a bard performing, and telling the history of the town. Unless the characters (not the players) have taken part in DDEP 02, there is no solid opening information, beyond people talking in passing in a tavern. This sort of cold entry isn't my sort of thing, but I know it works for some people, so sure. But what happens next is just bad writing.

The bard uses an ability similar to the college of glamour's enthralling performance to incapacitate most of the crowd - unless the characters make an insight check (for no reason) against the bard, they are subject to a charisma save or be incapacitated. Ok, this is probably a bit poorly written - why would anyone make an insight check against the evenings entertainment? But it's not wholely unreasonable. The next bit is.

The bard attempts to incapacitate the entire party, and then ghosts possess some commoners and battle ensues. For any character that suceeded on the saving throw, or is paying attention at all, the logical first person target is going to be that bard. But the bard has no stats (because it is actually the BBEG in disguise), and the adventure says to basically hand wave any sort of interaction with the bard away. If the players knock his 'ghost' away, and don't let him leave during the encounter, he 'slips away' afterwards, when any reasonable party will have been watching him closely, if not holding onto him/tied/manacled him so he doesn't get away.

The players are then forced into continuing that night, because, for some reason, the bartender blames them for the disruption to her establishment - and not the bard that she hired for the entertainment that night. I get the 'make the adventurers think about the cost of their actions' angle - but this is a really poorly executed form of it. She is blaming them for saving her life, and the lives of her patrons, from someone she invited in and hired. The net result is that the players again feel like they've been hit in the face by deus ex machina, and left to think they've got no choice in the matter - breaking Rule #1 again.

All of this is because the bard is actually a higher level bad guy - I'm assuming one that will get confronted in the sequel, which is a tier 3 adventure. The reasoning given in the adventure is that he's too powerful to list stats for in this tier. In that case, I'd say: choose a more tier appropriate bad guy, make him act through an intermediary, or make this adventure the same tier as the conclusion. The adventure goes for a Strahd-esque Big bad guy who interacts with the party from the get go, but is not executed anywhere near as well, and ends up having the players and characters being frustrated at DM-fiat and/or the deus ex machina methods that need to be used to make the plot make sense.

The meat of the adventure (yes, everything before this was about act 1), is decent, with lots of possible discussion and investigation - all of which is trivialised if your party has a paladin or cleric with zone of truth prepared, but what investigation adventure isnt? The problem with it is that it all rests on the initial set up of the adventure, which simply does not work very well. If the first act was rewritten to be less hand-wavey, then the rest of the adventure would actually work pretty well. As is, the foundation is rubbish, and so the rest of it just can't stand up.