Bargain bin only
Firstly the nice things: the story is complex and entertaining, but also familiar in a good way. It is standard sci-fi stuff, but can be quite gripping at times. The visuals are excellent, very smooth and polished. Another nice touch is the ability to generate force fields, shields to protect your buildings from enemies, although it isn't really that big a deal since once you get some decent turrets you hardly ever use it. I also very much enjoyed the ability of units to morph. This is a nice idea that is implemented and used well.
Now, onto the negatives: Most irritating is that there is no option to quieten the voice as it is tied to the volume of the effects. If you quieten the effects you can't hear the battles. The zooming mechanism is ok, but hasn't got a sufficient scale to easily negotiate the map, it hardly zooms out at all. I realise these are not particularly game breaking, but the main point is that this game does absolutely nothing new. It sticks to the tried and tested formula dating back to Dune 2. To be honest, after playing the first major campaign I grew bored and wondered if it was really worth continuing. Gather resource, build base, build army, destroy enemy. The resource gathering has been stripped to one resource (through terraforming). Unfortunately, the AI of the terraform units is poor. They don't seem to follow any logical progression, it's certainly not the chronological order which you instructed, meaning that if you need a certain bit done (to join your base for example) at that specific time, you have to delete all the other bits. The scourge AI is poor too, they merely break out of the ground and lunge to your nearest building repeating ad nauseum.
Again, this is the classic case of something that has a couple of gimmicks being classified innovative when it just isn't. I think a lot of reviewers get innovation confused with name changes. Instead of mining ore you terraform, rather than having a construction yard you have a frame. Windtraps/power generators are called energy cores. This isn't innovation, it's renaming, the core gameplay is completely the same as it has been for that past 15 years. Don't believe the hype (unless it's less a fiver).