Blodo

First impressions?

List of things I like:
- Naval combat and the way it's done
- Gridded building system, easier to orient structures that way
- Coop campaign is an interesting thing, especially the way you get to give orders to the AI ally. Although I think it makes a few missions a bit easy though
- Music
- A lot of the actors there are awesome, Tim Curry, Peter Stormare and George Takei to mention the best

List of things I hate:
- Lack of continuity between the campaigns.
- Battlefield locations in the campaign are... ridiculous. You have the feeling like you're just bunny hopping all across the world without rhyme, reason nor tactical sense. At least RA2 had some sort of continuity regarding battle locations, here you find Empire attacking St. Petersburg (bypassing both Soviets and Allies god knows how) while the Soviets do the same and attack the Empire very capital then meet with the Allies on Easter Island of all places only to set a trap for the Allied Forces, who appeared to have consolidated the bulk of their forces there. Why? I dunno, do you?
- Transporting units over water (especially tanks)... TW didn't require that much clicking and micromanagement just to get a couple of tanks across a pond, especially if you have less transports than you have tanks and you have to do several trips. By the time you are done with it, the batch of troops you transported before might as well already be dead, unless you micro them in the process, but then you can't micro your other group into transports to reinforce the first one, considering that you can't just give an order for a group of units to load into a group of transports, but you need to individually order them into each transport. Ridiculously poorly done for a game where if your attention wavers for a second you might lose everything due to a sudden enemy attack before you manage to respond.
- To build on the previous point: Micro oriented gameplay despite the fact that units are still rather frail... means you turn your sight away from them for a second and when you come back they can all already be dead, meanwhile since the economy is so slow this time around, even the loss of one unit hurts you tons unless you are floating well in the tens of thousands in cash.
- Ultra-slow and oversimplified resource system, which revolves around either you holding it, or the enemy holding it, or it being unclaimed. This method makes for very few expansion points (which EA tried to circumvent by spamming ore generators across maps, but that only worked partially), and the lack of expansion points means no more fighting to hold ore fields, or creatively stealing your opponents ore when he's not looking (like in TW). One thing hasn't changed from the beta though and that is that you're either always out of cash or you float in thousands of credits (depending on the map).
- Lack of uselessness of oil derricks. You're gonna spend more trying to hold the frail things, than you're going to make money off them.
- Ultimate lack of any sort of repair in the field, despite the fact that on smaller maps your cash is almost perpetually zero. The match turns into a clickfest, and your focus needs to be godly in order to not unnecessarily lose units.
- I mentioned this before (not in this thread), but I am going to do it again: japanese school girls, supermechs and the general overdone technology of the Empire...

Conclusion: RA3 has a few cool things, but overall TW holds superiority... I now am of the notion that EA took a bit of a step back in certain fields, considering that TW was very streamlined for competitive gameplay, even despite the frequent spam of units. And the campaign in TW... no it wasn't realistic, but it was believable and the story made sense. It is a disappointment for me when the story in RA3 looks like it's been just taped onto the game itself and given the lowest priority during development, since it definitely could've been done better. Even RA2 was far superior in that respect. The balance of the game has taken a wrong turn the moment the game became unforgiving. I don't think even Starcraft (which is the king of all clickfests) is this dependent on minimal losses, and generally offers some way of evading damage using special abilities while RA3 offers none. This means that you're frequently caught between a rock and a hard place, or rather between lack of cash and you losing units due to battlefield attrition, since you need to withdraw them back to base to repair them. And then there is catering to cultural memes rather than writer's creativity...

In short: It failed to meet expectations. Some of the expectations were obvious fail (unit and tech concepts of Empire), others only disappointed in final release (direction of gameplay balance). EA should stop trying to milk the franchise, and hire some top dog writers for the next installment instead... and a balance guy that ain't intent on wracking the games' player base with frustration!

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Phew, that's a big wall of text. Now that I got that off of my chest... what were your impressions after the first session?