I'm about halfway through this. I've played a few games by Petrglyph. 8 bit armies and a bit of 8 bit hordes (a warcraft inspired one) this is a whole lot better, but there are a few things to say of it which are lacking.

The gimmick of the game is you have a very large tech tree with which you can research and upgrade your units. there are but a handful of RTS games I've played where you can customize them like this, but this bit is quite nice. You have to go for a bit of balance here, opting for a unit comp that is good against this and against that (infantry, LV's armor, aircraft, buildings) you can diversify your damage types as well (there's at least half a dozen) and some other things. the game staggers you so that you can build a low tech build easily but have to build lots of structures to unlock higher tiers. this means you have to pace yourself before going for the main force.

This all plays out quite nicely, but sometimes you just get a bad comp and have to tweak it, then do the same for the next mission. The other thing is this game you can get overrun very quickly, if it's a bad balance or a bad comp against your opponent.

the game has a very strong C&C feel in terms of the unusual weaponized applications of technology (glue gun? Sound cannon?), and a rather good score, and very progressively unfolding missions that change as you go, but it doesnt quite have the same kind of playtested sort of hand-fit balance. the ala carte approach makes it much more chaotic and fast paced as you rush to unlock your stuff and conquer 'outposts' before the next guy, and you don't have the luxury to just build and slowly inch your way across a map. Not bad, just different.

the main criticism of the game is the way unlocking works and how the chief merit of the idea kind of goes in the way against the game too. basically its' repetitive and you might grind a mission once or twice or three times on the different difficulty settings to advance a bit on the tree and play around with your options. it's not a bad idea but it gets stale. you can also exploit this by just farming an easy 5 minute skirmish mission over and over again to unlock the whole game in an hour... but what is the fun in that?

i think it does what it is supposed to as an RTS but i'm unsure if i'll finis this one. I probably will unless it gets very difficult. FWIW every single RTS i have played (a total of four) that have this customization mechanic all were all-out leftfield/janky in their design for different reasons and this one is at least not that deviant.