Still entertaining but falls short of even CNC3. Waiting this long it was worth the $15 I paid but only just.
I've sunk almost 20 hours into this game and there's some glimmer of hope that there's fun to be had soon but so far it's been more grind and less immersion.
The single biggest problem is that this game tries to be World in Conflict, which itself isn't something to condemn, but then fails to give gamers the experience we were offered in either the CNC games that have come before or WIC. This would have been a far superior game had it been an extension of CNC3 (play much the same way but maybe a little quicker with faster unit production or a shorter but broader tech tree so advanced stuff gets accessed quicker) or go the whole nine yards and clone WIC (everyone gets support powers but the Support crawler gets a few unique ones and gets the others cheaper, force players to rely on team mates to counter enemies with Support>Offence>Defence>Support) and no god-damn unlocks!
Given I picked this up years after release just about everyone else playing multiplayer has unlocked all the content. This wouldn't be a problem if the game was reasonably balanced between earlier and later units and tech and you could be competitive from the start as long as you were skilled enough but that's simply not the case. I'm effectively barred from multiplayer with human players until I grind my way up to unlocking at least the entire second tier (3 total) of units. If you want players to get super competitive with the multiplayer element you set up a leaderboard where your score slowly decreases when you're not playing (ala WIC), not penalise new players and any team that is unfortunate enough to be burdened by them.
The path finding is as bad as ever. Reviewers have criticised the path finding as a persistent problem of the CNC universe but I found it quite reasonable in CNC3. What's happened EA? Couldn't you have dug up all your existing algorithms rather than have my units moving in the same direction but at different speeds get stuck on each other? What's galling is that this is years after release and they've never bothered to fix it with a patch.
All the units take about half an hour to die. Huh? They've arranged it so the units are slow, take forever to die and the maps are small so in multiplayer team mates have an opportunity to join your mosh pit before it's decisively resolved. This itself is somewhat fun but waiting forever for any unit to die is extremely unsatisfactory. There's simply no impact from the weapons.
The other really tragic element is the campaign is annoying, tedious and compared to either CNC3 or WIC massively disappointing. You don't have a good idea of why you're doing something half the time and even if you did you probably don't care. The story itself is tolerable but the execution to missions is lackluster. ***Spoiler follows, skip to next paragraph to avoid spoilers*** In the first non tutorial GDI and NOD missions you're tasked with protecting civilians. In the GDI version your wife dies in a scripted event but being so early in the game the character hasn't developed enough to make you care (although they did try very hard with some very laboured acting and fawning). Then there's a series of suicidal civilian convoys that try to breach a NOD checkpoint and you are severely under-resourced to take them on. The only strategy is to sit your forces in the middle of the mess to act as cannon fodder while enough civilian trucks slip through. In the NOD version you're protecting them from NOD separatists but for some reason that's not made clear you're also fighting GDI that are also trying to protect the convoys from these separatists. Huh? At least in this version they don't stray too far from your crawler so you have some control. They're decided unsuicidal this time. Nothing quite this retarded happened in CNC3. Why did they clearly put so much less love and effort into the game that is to be Kane's send off?
I'm not a graphics snob and the graphics are decent although I haven't noticed their being any superior over CNC3 despite requiring much more resources at the highest settings.
The sound and music is one of the few things for which I have no complaint. It's a joy.
I don't particularly mind the always on requirement as it's not that big a deal as long as you're not suffering first week issues like Diablo 3 or Sim City and my ISP is fairly stable.
I'm in Australia. Australian new releases cost $89.95 retail (at current exchange rates this is about US$89.95). I would have marched back to the store and demanded my money back had I pre-ordered this. However I only paid $15. There is enough in this to warrant $15 but only just.