A polished and immersive experience with a few serious quirks that prevent it from obtaining true greatness.
The Good:
Beautiful visuals (for the most part), and a fantastic, detailed and enormous set of units to play with. The gameplay mechanics are compelling and quite deep, particularly for an RTS, requiring a careful balance of big picture moves against micromanagement. Its a game where time flies by trying to keep track of all of your units while moving aggressive (cause staying put is a sure fire way to die quick). Trying to maintain aircover, keeping an eye out for ambushes, and balancing resupply (units can run out of fuel and ammo very quickly) will definitely keep your focus.
I was a little worried about how the addition of aircraft would work, wondering if they would be simple one pass weapons, or turned into starcraft-esque air units, but my worries were for unfounded. Aircraft work brilliantly, and are exciting to watch. It can be a nailbiting experience watching a fighter scream across the map, hoping there aren't any hidden anti-air units along its flight path.
While some will make accusations of the campaign being a total war clone, which to be fair, isn't a completely unfounded accusation, I myself found it to be quite a bit of fun, and *much* more compelling than the original "campaign" in European Escalation. There are random events, along with actions that can be played to influence how the tactical battles may be fought.
The Mixed:
The time limits on the campaign battles are a little frustrating. I sort of get what the developers were trying (force you to be aggressive, combined with the persistent losses across battles) but it can be frustrating to have draw after draw. I wish/hope the devs change this to a tunable feature like the difficulty.
The sounds are still.... mediocre. They do the job, but they aren't going to blow you away by any stretch.
The Bad:
Not being able to save when you want is a huge pain in the ass, and serves no purpose beyond frustrating more casual gamers. Seriously Eugen, WTF. I'm a lousy RTS player, so I need me some good save points, instead you lump on the frustration as I watch all my preparation go to waste because I mixed up one unit (there are around 800) with another when I deployed, and can't load the damn game to fix it.
The Bottom Line:
A good game, that (knock on wood) with a tweak or two could become amazing.