Good but not great

This is the first time that we have sailed with NCL, having sailed a few times with Royal Caribbean (RCI) and Carnival. 

The Epic is a very large, very brown ship. What does that mean?

The ship has 4000+ passengers and it feels like it, nearly everywhere is crowded, but not everywhere. Brown, well shades of brown seems to be the color of choice its a bit like a huge UPS van, that to me, made everything rather bland.

Let's go through the ship experience.

Getting on the ship was easy and well managed. There are a wide variety of bars and restaurants on board which is good, but the bars are nearly all clustered to gather, which increases the sense of it being crowded. 

We only ate in the main dining room, called Taste and that was pretty good. The food was decent and the service very good and friendly. The variety of food was mainly American in style, we prefer a more international selection. The passengers were mainly American aged 30 upwards, with a scattering of other nationalities and ages.

Our balcony cabin, looked brown, but quite nice, however, it was cramped, felt more cramped than RCI. Much has been said about the bizarre arrangements of the shower and toilet. For some strange reason they separated them, so one is on one side of the cabin and the other on the opposite side, both behind frosted glass, so all can be seen, heard and smelt through the cabin, sorry about that, but that is the truth. The sliding doors are noisy, so you will wake anyone else up in the cabin if you use it at night. We found the bed short, hard and uncomfortable. I am 5'10 and my feet hung over the end of the bed very easily.

The buffet bar was very crowded all the time but the food was OK.

I found the service friendly and good and officers were seen about the ship often, but not one of them spoke to us.

Here is a tip: humans are predictable in their behavior, so if you want to avoid crowds, remember that and look for alternative places and times to do things and look for the quiet places on the ship. It works! Think about when will most people eat, go at a different time. Do people really explore or just go where the others are? The latter, so explore and you will find some great comfortable places.

So in summary, a good cruise experience on the whole, but we feel that Royal Caribbean is better, NCL is definitely better than Carnival in our opinion.

I hope this helps.