Dont judge it if you've played it for 30min
The game's main campaign story was actually written by a famous novelist who was also an US air force officer(forgot his name). With cutscenes filmed in real environment and acted by real actors, the game's production value is quite amazing, it really draws you into the story . If you liked how the SP was done for C&C prior to Generls, you gotta love this one.
The game's graphix is stunning. The screenshots really dont do this game justice, because you really have to see the battles in motion, the effects are just so nicely done. when you blow up a building, it wont just fall down and disappear, it does what a real building would do that is catch fire and burn baby burn. The most beautiful thing about this game are the maps. There are so many different types of objects you can put into a map and they are just so carefully created, the ubran environment feels so alive. Unlike in Generals buildings in Act of war are modelled with realistic scale, so people can put great amount of details into a map.
Some of the gameplay features are also worth mentioning, such as the resource in the game. In act of war there is only one resource that is money$_$.
You can get money by three means, drill for oil, occupy a bank, and POW. POW stands for prisoner of war, yes you can get money by capturing wounded enemy soldiers, or downed enemy aircraft pilots, in fact this is the only way to keep a constant income throughout a match. It's brilliant. Another interesting feature is how you use the buildings. You can put soldiers in any buildings, you can do that in Generals as well, but in act of war, with the realistic building size, it becomes more dramatic, it brings out the true feeling of urban warfare. In an urban battle, it's curial to take and hold buildings, tanks in this case are quite useless. There are a lot of other good gameplay feature, but I am too lazy to write them all down, so you just have to get the game and find out for yourself lol.
The multiplayer part of the game is also pretty good. The game feels already pretty balanced right out of the box, and the patches fixed the minor issues and added a map editor. There is an active online community, it's not huge like warcraft3 but it's there and it's dedicated. There are lots of excellent user created maps, they really add a lot of replayability.
In conclusion, although act of war may seems to most of us as a Generals clone, but if you dig it, you'll find out that it's actually a breath of fresh air. It's quite cool, so give it a try!