It's the bees knees, but not for everyone. It's really fast for an RTS, matches/missions are over in under 15 minutes, ranked 1v1 games I've played were in the 3-7 minute range. This is great for me as I tend to get really stressed playing PvP RTS for too long, and besides I'm perfectly used to shorter matches in multiplayer games, but if you're looking for huge glorious battles lasting at least 30 minutes this isn't your game.
One of the great things is that playing with a gamepad doesn't handicap you in any way, which is monumental for RTS. Even more impressive is they actually kept all the nuance, the little micromanagement techniques that Starcraft players use are all there and much less demanding to execute. You can focus fire, kite, pull fodder out in front and artillery in the back, all with a thumbstick and two triggers, and it doesn't feel clunky at all - in fact I much prefer not having to assign any control groups or do awkward box selection to pull these off. Macromanagement has been streamlined as well so there's no need to manually select buildings and queue unit production, it all happens automatically and you just decide between building structures and selling them. Might sound like you'd run into problems with units building when you don't want them to, but you can sell them for full refund instead so no problems there. The overlaying strategy is still present - same old decisions between going eco or aggro, whether to take early expansion or stay on one, between mass Tier 1 or rushing Tier 3. You can turtle, you can rush. Everything as usual.
As for the story campaign, it's dark and great, with some neat twists. The missions themselves are nicely varied, but the difficulty ramps up quickly. It's definitely not the type of game where you storm through every mission on the first try, by the end of the campaign you'll be pretty much used to your first try on a mission being you trying to get a feel of what's being demanded of you, then the next 3 tries will be spent trying out different strategies. Very different, but neat. Short mission length ensures you never feel like you lost much progress when you lose.
It's different from most RTS, yet oddly familiar. I guess a good way to put it would be it's streamlined in an eccentric yet very efficient manner. It controls differently, it's faster and more focused, but still the same old beast. Did they have to sacrifice a lot of what makes RTS games fun to make it work? In my opinion, not at all. However, if you don't care for the gameplay or the competitive aspect of RTS games and just want to build a lot of tanks and roll over the enemy, you're probably better off getting something like, I dunno, Ashes of the Singularity?
