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Overall I feel that AWR is a great hack, and after going through most of its content, I would say that it's more than worth the time for any AW fan to go through at least the normal campaign.

The CO changes are great and help to keep the game spicy and fresh compared to the base game. There are a couple of instances where I think the creator may have over-tuned or over-nerfed certain COs, but as a whole I think they did a fairly good job. I would've loved to see a more comprehensive list of the changes made in the description/documentation, but I understand the brevity could be seen as a hook to draw players into trying out the hack to see the changes themselves. And if certain content wasn't locked behind such controversial requirements/time sinks, I'd have no issue with this whatsoever.

While the campaign has a bunch of content, and is largely entertaining and innovative, it also contains the hack's greatest weakness in the form of its difficulty scaling. Unfortunately once you step into the hard campaign or, God forbid, the "hachi challenges", the game has the tendency to escalate every map to instead become a knowledge check on how you can best cheese the quirks of the AW2 AI. You soon see that the only way to stop the 8 added neotanks is to lead them and two tanks to a choke point, where the AI will happily let their 3hp normal tanks remain on the front lines doing nothing, while the slew of disgustingly expensive/powerful units sit behind them like they were stuck in traffic while you use indirect to kill them or otherwise ignore the clump entirely. This is not a test of tactical acumen or an interesting challenge within the bounds of the game's established rules and mechanics. It's an arbitrary knowledge check with a single pre-determined solution to the map that requires you to rely on the AI getting stuck in a behavior that no actual reasonable opponent would do.

You may read the above and say "oh, well just don't play the hard campaign 4head". And I'd agree, except for that as early as when you first load the game, you're presented with a message that says there's content and secrets only found in the hard mode or the even more egregious "hachi challenges". The fear of loss compels you to play into the mandatory tedious slog of cheesing the AI at every opportunity. If you don't intend on using save states/rewinds/fast forwarding and other emulator tools, be prepared to suffer to scrape by with even a C ranking after a painstaking amount of time and trial+error. (Let's not even mention that the new S rank requirements of getting a perfect score are absurd...)

With the above said, if you do your best to ignore the hard campaign and the later bullshit war room maps and just stick with the normal campaign, you're going to have a lovely time. And aside from the poor difficulty scaling, everything else seen is an absolute delight. The story is rich and true to the COs' characters, and the normal maps are creative and interesting for the most part, though sometimes still suffer from having a heavy-handed pre-determined solution.

tl;dr: unless you're a masochist, play/enjoy the well crafted normal mode and stop there. The headache and level of tedium isn't worth the FOMO on the "extra" stuff

I was looking forward to this hack. I really was. I wish someone had said it'd be a puzzle hack. Not every mission is like this but early on there were enough that I finally got frustrated and quit playing after beating my 3rd puzzle mission.

What do I mean by puzzle mission? Basically, when there is only one way to do things to complete the mission. The first one actually wasn't that bad, With Max just go up the side of the map with less enemies and build up your army from there. Cool. Whatever.

The 2nd one I found however pissed me off so much. You have a short window (6days) to blow up a pipe seam on the farthest side of the map or have 15 cities captured. The window is too short to reasonably capture the cities. So you have to make a beeline for the pipe. Did I mention it's a naval battle and Flak considerably more subs and indirects than you do? You have to have a perfect move by move, attack by attack sequence to win this in 6 days.

Once I reached the 3rd mission like this I quit and wrote this review. This type of game isn't fun for me. I don't mind playing a difficulty hack, but I do not want to find the creator's one strategy for winning their scenarios over and over again. I want some freedom to choose and a little leeway to make a mistake.

1/10- The only reason it's not zero is because I understand that people that like finding solutions to hard puzzles will like this game.

Much harder than the base game. Definitely emphasized how bad I am at the game.