I have tried desperately to see the appeal in this game. I'm not finding it at all.
So, for starters, the game is imbalanced as hell. Some missions are a total cake walk. Others are utter nightmares to outright impossible under certain conditions. And there is little rhyme or reason to it. Take for instance mission 3. Mission 1 is just a glorified story starter with no actual challenge. Mission 2 has a very tiny amount of challenge. Then suddenly 3 comes along, and if you enter it with a decent sized fleet, it is literally impossible to complete. A necessary mission object is under attack right away in the mission, and no amount of intervention on your part will save that objective before it is destroyed. So, paradoxically, what you need to do is come into the mission gimped so that the auto balance doesn't put you in the impossible situation. And this is too common, but also not. Other mission are a total breeze even if you come in maxed. Thus this auto balance is TERRIBLE to an extreme degree. Oh there is no difficulty setting or cheats to get you through this, so well you're screwed if you run into one of these situations. This reason has now burned me on this game more than a half dozen times. This above all else is the game's main issue, although there is plenty more than make tolerating this just not happening.
Okay, let's move onto story. It's... an okay story, nothing special like I was lead to believe. However, that's not the issue. The delivery is the problem. You essentially get story delivered 2 ways, between mission cutscenes which are okay, and in mission story delivery. The cutscenes aren't really good looking but adequate I suppose. They don't get in the way and get the job done. However, the in mission cutscenes are a total NUISANCE. Gameplay does not stop while these are playing, yet you have control stolen from you. Take for instance again mission 3. Right at the start you'll get one of these in mission cutscenes telling you the objective is under attack, but this steals invaluable seconds from you to actual address the attack. If you actually watch the cutscene it is so bad it is potentially possible to lose the objective before you've even had a chance to act on it! Now you can often skip the bulk of the cutscene, but not all of it. And it isn't just that one. A later mission objective gives this long drawn out scene that serves literally no purpose, it is just there to show off a unit with zero dialog, but gameplay is still going on and you could have lost half your fleet by the time you realize this. WTF! Either gameplay should have stopped, or the dialog and such should have been delivered while you continued to have control. Nope, we get the worst of both worlds.
And then we get to the actual game mechanics. Okay, so this is supposedly a full 3D game world, so none of this 2D combat in space nonsense. This is noble... save it is a lie. It is more 3D than many to be sure, but it is painfully clear the units weren't actually programmed properly for this 3D world. Say you're taking a group of corvettes into battle against something at a different Z coordinate. Your corvettes will climb/dive until they are on the same plane as their target then start firing. Why? Why don't they just spin and aim at the enemy unit and start attacking. What is special about the flat plane? Well, nothing really, it is just bad design. There is a certain degree of 3D engagement, but not all of it. The sad thing about this is I've actually seen 2D space games do this better.
But there is other issues on top of this. The AI frequently breaks for movement. Units will become inexplicably unresponsive to commands. It seems to be something to do with conflicted path finding but it is very annoying. Another issue is the camera is inexplicably limited at times. I focus on a group and can neither get a good close look at them, nor a good far away look at them. The camera just doesn't move that far and is often very poor at giving you a feel for the battle, so instead you have to manually fidget with it manually which you shouldn't have to as all it really needed was more of a range of movement in focus mode. 3D movement is also very difficult to use and often far more a nuisance than it is ever useful to the game. It does have an older UI design so it is missing many more modern amenities that newer RTS have, which I don't knock it much for but you definitely miss these things.
Now that's not to say it is all bad. As space sims go, the remaster has done an admirable job on it, and the music and the rest of the sound is quite nice. But ultimately this is the fluff and the meat of the game just doesn't live upto it. Ultimately I'm of the opinion the game would probably have been better in 2D and with a static balancing system.