Introduction
On the face of it, this would seem like another war rts in an already crowded market, but in fact it's much more than that.
Gameplay
The first difference from most rts games is the lack of any building or even resource capturing. Games are won instead by capturing "command points" that require a unit to be in each of the required circles for that point. Although these points do nothing for you except help you jostle for control of the map, at which point the enemies bar drops faster and victory is likely.
The biggest difference however, is that online you're not required to take management of an army and go at most 4v4, in fact all server in the beta are 16v16, and you have to specialize in either Armour, Air, Support or Infantry, each with it's own strengths and weaknesses.
Upon choosing a specialization you are given 4000 points to spend (with an additional 2000 that will trickle in to your pool after you start the match (when a unit dies it's points will also trickle back in to the pool)) on units, Armour for instance, has Heavy Tanks (1200), Medium Tanks (800), Light Tanks (600), Armoured Transport (800), Amphibious armored Transport (650). It is also possible to buy units from outside your specialization at an increased price and the best units are exclusive anyway.
After arriving, you're free to do what ever you want with your units, but obviously the way to win is team play, since things like armor have little anti-air it's useful to team up with some with AA.
Additionally to all this, there is the tactical aid (TA) that gives you TA points for capturing and fortifying command points and for killing enemies (all of which will also rank up your units making them better). TA points can be spent on about 15 different things such as defensive things like dropping a humvee to heal your units, or things like artillery strikes, napalm, tank buster, air to air strikes, chemical gas but the best of all is the nuke which costs 80 points (usually not reachable in a single match without donations from other players) and results in a huge mushroom cloud that covers about 1/6 of the map and obliterates anything too close. Moving the camera in to the blast also results in a fuzzy picture and a gieger counter that understandably goes crazy. The resulting radiation will stay in the area for a few minutes and anything going through will lose health.
Overall game play is great and allows for so much diversity in the way that you play making it very tactical.
Sights and Sounds
Bombing runs, napalm and nukes look stunning in the game and things will look good even when zoomed right in (the picture below was on medium settings)
Since game accounts are directly linked to forum accounts, your forum avatar will appear on all your units in game, like so:
In terms of sounds, theres not much to say, it's war so expect lots of guns firing and tank tracks moving.
Stuff that sucks
Games are often lost because of foolish teammates not working as a team and some people like to stat pad to get higher in the rankings (like bf2). Also some people don't like to wait for reinforcements after just having all their units wiped out but then my advice to them is not to get their units wiped out in the fist place, the best games I've had I've managed to keep every one of my original units.
Conclusion
It really is an rts for fps gamers and short of unlocks, the ranking and medal system is the same as bf2. Overall i love the game, it's addictive and fun so i urge you all to give it a try and not to be discouraged even when you're playing with a bunch of idiots.
Score :
As well as finding all the bugs etc, a Beta is a good chance for a bit of an overview of how the game will run, so as good an opportunity as any for first impressions.
