Review is for single player campaign only. I only did one play through with a persistent fleet.

Purchased at a super deep discount.

First off, this game is beautiful. The "Dune" aesthetic is easily managed and the effects are awesome. Smoke, fire, explosions, and electrical effects combine to provide a visceral experience.

The game grapples with and mostly wins one of the staple foils of the RTS genre: scale! Cinematics often zoom-in and use your personalized battlefield as a backdrop to the narrative. A very deliberate sense of scale (established from the human up) is present from the get go.

Only late game where average unit size grows does the abstraction we've come to accept in the genre really impose itself upon us. But still, it's much much better than Ashes of the Singularity (are these colossal tanks or nanites battling in my bloodstream?) or even Starcraft, where if the cinematics are anything to go by, you've been controlling an abstraction on any and every mission that occurs outdoors.

The only true failure of scale in Deserts of Kharak is that certain weapon ranges still feel massively shrunk. It'd be nice to have railguns easily firing multiple kilometers and artillery firing tens of kilometers...at the very least. Then again, the sand dunes lend to a claustrophobic experience, somewhat negating this issue. The 550m carrier can engage targets 2000 meters away, however I'd argue seeing as the smallest units are about 12 meters in length, that length is constantly fighting to become the base unit of distance. So the game is smaller than it advertises.

Criticisms:
•smaller units seem to become totally irrelevant in the late game
•there should be a higher campaign difficulty available
•truly epic battles are never fully realized: this partially due to narrative decisions (which I support), however may also be a technical limitation: i7 8700, GTX 1070, 16GB RAM and noticed slow downs during intense fighting at 1440p
•certain units (bombers I'm looking at you) never felt useful
•area of effect and "beam of light" healing is just another cheesy fantasy effect; life bars on vehicles is a lost opportunity for engine, weapon, and systems damage
•be nice to see humans and crews clambering on those dunes!
• the AI in campaign mode does not seem to possess any guile and depends on pre-scripted events
• there seems to be a push in the meta toward "support a Battler Cruiser and an Artillery Cruiser with three Support Cruisers," repeat ad nauseam

When the game works, however, it really works. The sense of managing a fleet from a tactical screen is often palpable. You'll dispatch fighters to multiple locations simultaneously; "launch the alert fighters!" In many ways this game is a ground-based Battlestar Galactica -- and that's a very good thing!

When an enemy patrol crests a dune by surprise and the firepower erupts -- there the game is unmatched in my experience. Measured by its lows it's a hand-holding exercise in monotony. Measured by its highs it's a hyper tense and cut-throat depiction of hard future-conventional warfare.

This game manages more, though. It does away with base building without a loss, keeping elements of tech trees. The tension of protecting your base is still present as you must always protect your carrier. The nice thing is the carrier can move. Battles, then, always have at least a slow dynamicism to them.

I like also that unit production is fast: the game isn't wasting our time! Resource gathering is similarly quick. The ability to recycle units at 75% further intensifies the speed and fluidity. Finally, resources are metal. To make ships. Nice. (Dispense with abstractions!)

I read a review that criticised the game for most battles becoming masses of ships balled up and mashed together. This isn't inaccurate but may be a red herring. I'm certain the raw control given us over the units is an attempt at (or at least justified as) a means of removing any possible micro skill ceiling. This is fine, it works, and it's par for the course, especially for multiplayer. Moving forward in the genre, though, it'd sure be nice to be able to assign behaviours and operational areas to groups and units. An outnumbered unit shouldn't so enthusiastically leave the high ground (but also shouldn't be stuck in position!). Maybe one day RTS games will have two control modes: "classic" and "behavioural."

In conclusion, this game is amazing. It's not perfect, but it is clearly a labour of love. It manages to both honour and transcend the genre. This in a historical low RTS-wise.

I want a follow up. I want more missions. I want bigger battles. Hire these guys to bring us an Epic 40k game. I want, I want. Thank you. I'll pay more next time.

-Cheese