Talk about your strategy games for the XBOX and its a pretty thin line up. Thank God this game launched.
The gameplay is pretty generic with a Blue Army and Red Army (yes those are the names) fighting it out when Red Army starts a war. You being a peaceful country with a butt load of munitions and military to boot, fight back inorder to make the world a safer place? Complicated by this? You shouldn't be and if you are then you might want to consider something else since the next part is complicated.
Thats the level of units you can choose from. In most of the mission games I played (I think I was on 20 the last time I checked) choosing your units are predetermined for you and your not allowed to buy more units. Its when you choose the single mission mode that the options become incredible. There is practically every military unit available from around the world in this game as an option. This also increases as you play the mission games because you unlock further options to your unit selection. The complicated part hear is choosing the right unit for what you want to do as the cost is different for each type of unit, works differently and have different armaments. So if you need to get a bomber to a location on the map and you need it fast, but you don't have any place else for that plane to land when its done with its bombing run other than back at its starting point (which is a problem because it only has so much fuel) and the only thing that will make it there and back is a bomber, but it will move to slow so you have to choose how are you going to do this. Sacrifice a plane or hope your units can hold out long enough for that bomber to get there.
The game allows for you to capture cities, ports airbases and other capitals (which usually ends the game unless there are multiple opponents.) Another thing to consider is what type of units to capture with. Infantry units can capture a any of the above locations on the turn they move into them. Other units (all mechanical) have to wait in the hex and then capture it as their first move on the next turn.
This brings of the grid system which is all hexagons. Another thing is the movement. When your unit moves there is a designation in green and then red. Green areas are teh optimal movement areas. Those in red consume more fuel and I believe make it harder to hit enemies (I only rented the game so I didn't get the manual so I am not sure.) So moving into the red is only important when you have to A: get somewhere fast and B: get somewhere fast and shoot something. There are also 7 (thats right 7) different layers for movement. When flying there is high, medium, low and ground (ground usually means skimming across the water only.) For boats and subs theres surface, shallow sea and deep sea. And for vehicles and infantry there is ground. All of this is further complimented with terrain types for the land and sea. Mountains, hills, marsh, desert, etc. etc. all effect land movement. For the seas there are what are called shallows. Areas that only certain ships can use to unload there units (and if you have a flying unit you have to be out of the shallows to launch your helicopters.)
Sound Complicated? To the novice at strategy games maybe. For myself it wasn't all that bad.
The gameplay was a little tricky since you control your movement around with the joysticks and zoom in and out with the trigger buttons. The HUD system was pretty to look at but I turned it off most times since I hardly used it.
Another thing was the map editor. You could create your own maps and play them with others. I barely got into this aspect but from what I saw it was pretty intensive and looked like would be a lot of fun to use.
So all and all a fun game with a lot of content. Definitely worth owning.