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Concept albums and rock operas are just one of those things that everyone has an opinion on. By their very nature--usually the need for some sort of thematic continuity--they tend to lack the amount of variation one would expect from more 'standard' albums, and the introduction of narrative and overarching themes often gets seen as pretentious. /Into the Electric Castle/, like nearly everything Ayreon does, clearly doesn't care about any of that and just does its own thing, and does it very well with excellent production values and high quality.
Depending on how you look at it, the story either doesn't make much sense or it makes so much sense as to be banal: taking the latter first, a cast of characters is whisked away by a godlike voice and told that they must enter "THE NUCLEAR PORTALS OF THE ELECTRIC CASTLE [guitar sting!]," which, one must admit, sounds so overblown as to be absolutely awesome. The characters are introduced, they proceed through various rooms and scenarios that draw out their archetypical characterizations further, quite a few 'perish' along the way, and then the final boss congratulates them on a job well done, explains what's up, then the survivors (at least) are put back where they belong. A very simple premise backed up by excellently done and varied music, mostly of the prog rock and prog metal varieties--basically, if you tend to like "progressive" stuff, buy this album; if not, don't.
As for not making sense, that depends one how deep one is in the Ayreon backstory and, dare I say it, meta-narrative. Most of the Ayreon albums are roughly linked in that they exist in the same universe as /The Final Experiment/. If one is expecting this to follow the plot of /The Final Experiment/ and the /Universal Migrator/ albums then this doesn't really fit until maybe the very end (and even then it's more of a thematic relationship than a chronological or "universal" one). The Futureman character is what throws it off, since some of his lines suggest that the 2084 cataclysm didn't happen.
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