As far as I've checked the reviews from many gaming sites, it seems that the graphics and the way the factions were designed is quite attractive. One faction plays like a different game. However, all these sites hates the campaign (too much cliche and predictable storyline) and, of course, Microsoft's Live for Windows (who doesn't hate a service that charges a subscription fee to play a custom game online?). You can check the coverage about these reviews at our friends from Petro-Gamers.
For the owners of the shipped game, the first patch was released. It includes several gameplay changes, fixing some of the path finding issues, or at least improving them on most maps.
This is what everybody knows so far.. so, let's get into the Petrolution's side of things:
-> Live for Windows sucks, it is a fact. But don't get scared with the game because of it. It's just a matter of few months (maybe years) until somebody makes an alternative free service for it. You may not find it now, because the service is new. Look at World of Warcraft, where there are inumerous free servers available, of course not supported by Blizzard. If we hear about any of them, we'll post about it in a news or in the forums, because we are fans of Petroglyph, not of Microsoft.
-> The game's moddability is limited at the moment, but it will be expanded in a future patch. Here's the words from BHayes-PG, UAW lead programmer, on this issue:
Attempting to override any kind of XML/LUA/BUI files is currently disabled in the shipped build. With our next patch we should have MOD support included which will allow you to selectivly override files in your MODPATH folder. Mod kit will also have the full XML/LUA/BUI source files and appropriate editors and debuggers for you to play with.
Brian
And yea, part of the blame goes once again to our lovely Live for Windows.
Config.meg is included in the LIVE security catalog. So any modification will trigger a LIVE initialization failure. The demo didn't have LIVE integration so it wasn't obeying the security catalog which is why you could modify it for the Demo. Best to just wait for the Mod kit which makes it work in an ideal fashion (ie: loose file and seperate .meg file support).
Brian
So, so far you can mod the demo, but not the shipped game.
And that's it, I hope you enjoy it, specially the conquer the world mode, which sounds the most attractive part of the game. I'm not getting the game for a while, because I live in Brazil, which is outside the North America, so the game will take a while to arrive here.