Gameplay: 85

Some fresh ideas and an overall quality gameplay that will keep you around the PC for hours. Massive maps, massive wars, and a quality story told in a total of 18 long missions, 6 for each side. Too bad about the zoom out problem, about the pathfinding AI sometimes and some annoying scripted moments in singleplayer campaigns. It's really frustrating that you HAVE to play with zoom out, and that units can sometimes act so dumb. I think it's the only game where you can look away for a moment and lose 200 units when you look back and wonder “how the **** did they get there in a straight line, just waiting to get killed”.

Graphics: 90

Excellent graphics, and the zoom options are incredible, you can get almost on the ground with your camera and zoom out until you see just different colored dots.

Multiplayer: 88

Like I said before, many options and maps, AI modes and addons. A complete multiplayer experience shadowed only by the high resource demand of the game.

Sound: 88

The music score is composed by the famous Jeremy Soule, the one not only responsible with the original Total Annihilation soundtrack, but with music composed for Guild Wars, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion as well. Unit sounds remind me of the original Total Annihilation, good, but a bit repetitive.

Hardware: 80

You can see that the game is really optimized, and there aren't any visible annoying bugs. Load times are short and everything works as it should. You can see that a lot of effort was put into it. It's just impossible to get it much better. But the big scale really brings even the best computers down to their knees. It's a price you have to pay for not compromising the scale... The size of the install is decent, somewhere around 8GB, and the game comes on a Dual Layer DVD.