Concept was good, execution could have been a lot better. Good enough to warrant a look.
The RTS elements are competently executed but extremely limited. A good commander could be replaced with a script and no one would notice. The decisions a commander has to make all have an immediately obvious answer to anyone with a working brain and more than 2 matches played. Here we see the second mistake the developers made: The answers typically require a working brain.
Every successful videogame has been built on the underlying assumption that the average gamer is educationally sub-normal. Savage 2 assumes that the average gamer is smart enough to follow instructions, give instructions and/or act in the absence of instructions. This is not the case. Most games have one or two intelligent players trying (and usually failing) to herd a mass of idiots in the general direction of victory with the end result being a defensive stalemate comparable to World War 1 because people are more interested in playing deathmatch than in destroying buildings. The remaining games typically end very rapidly because one or both commanders has attention deficit disorder and forgot to build anything. Ironically, I find this game to be most enjoyable when my team does not have a commander, enabling the build menu for everyone else and letting me pretend I'm playing an engineer in Team Fortress 2.
The FPS elements are better in that you couldn't improve the game (much) by replacing all the players with bots. There are a lot more decisions to be made and a lot more variety in playstyles. That said, there are some truly obnoxious design decisions that keep it from getting too interesting.
S2 insist that the game is melee oriented, but at the same time wanted to incorporate firearms into the game. The obvious solution would be to severely restrict ammunition for these weapons (this being the post-apocalyptic future, it's easy to justify supply shortages), but instead it's possible to carry hundreds of rounds as well as a sentry gun and portable ammo dump.
A better solution would be to give melee units additional movement options and/or stealth abilities, giving them creative ways to outmaneuver and ambush their opponents (Wolfteam did this, successfully balancing melee and ranged combat despite the presence of rocket launchers, belt-fed machine guns and instant kill sniper rifles), but in Savage 2, melee weapons only confer a minor speed bonus that's practically unnoticeable.
Savage 2 takes the lazy approach to balancing and simply reduces ranged damage so that a knife does more damage than a rocket launcher. No justification is given for this beyond "it's a melee game". It's not necessarily a bad idea, but could have at least tried to come up with some justification for it. In any case, it doesn't work, at least if you're playing as a human. The range and accuracy of the human weapons offsets the low damage and, combined with the fact that ranged weapons can't be blocked and the humans also have the only decent counter to ranged weapons, makes it entirely possible to rely on guns and only use melee weapons as a backup.
The melee combat is virtually identical to Rakion, except they removed special attacks and grips, leaving only blocking and basic attacks, leading to a situation where players either run at each other and hammer the attack button until one of them falls over, hold down the block button and wait for backup, or decide it would be easier to just shoot at each other. There is some skill involved, but it doesn't feel like it even when you are winning. You don't get the satisfaction you would from most games when you win a fight, because the combat feels random even when you do understand it.
The story is largely irrelevant to the game, but I'm going to mention it anyway because it annoys me immensely. The writers basically took the unabomber manifesto and put their names on the front. Humanity abandons all logic, reason and self preservation instinct and nukes itself because... the writers said so. There was no reason to set it in the future, as the game clearly doesn't take place in a universe that even remotely resembles ours. It could have been a generic fantasy world, but the writers had obviously seen Fight Club one too many times.
All that being said, the game isn't terrible by any means. There are some fun parts, like playing as one of the hilariously overpowered hellbourne units and going on a ridiculous killing spree, or when you do get a team that can actually work together and concentrate on the objectives, and these parts happen often enough for me to put this in the high end of the 'mediocre' category. It's not great, but it's worth a free download at least.