I would say stay away from the game because of the DRM alone. Let EA know why you will not buy the game and maybe they will change thier way,,,again! *sigh*
Just do not buy it and support greater publisher control over the user. Trust me, you can live without ever playing C&C 4

Generals was my favourite of the series.The campaign wasn't great but it almost never is in an rts and the multiplayer was fantastic. I have alot of good memories whooping my brothers ass every time we played.

Ahh well I never play MP so the campaign is all I ever play

I loved Supcom 1!

They also fired Pandemic, the guys who made Saboteur 8(
And the finale patch wasn't released because of this!

I prefer Stormregion/Innoglow's
[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codename_Panzers:_Cold_War]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codename_Panzers:_Cold_War[/url]
However, it's not a great time for the genre, only few quality games are out.

EA butchered C&C so badly with this game it's an atrocity.
I've been a Westwood fan since Dune 2. All I have to say it's that It isn't really C&C anymore. I'm a Level 20 GDI and have completed both campaigns. I only got to unlock everything as a Level 20 after completing the GDI campaign once and Co-oping the entire campaign again with friends.
The basic gameplay essentials of C&C are gone. You now choose between 1 of 3 mobile bases: Offense, Defense and Support.
Offense = tanks, mechs and heavy units.
Defense = Infantry, basic vehicles and structures+superweapon
Support = Airforce, air units, and support powers to use on yourself or teammates
You can't have like infantry, tanks and air units in a typical solo game anymore. Well I think you can, if you go through the trouble of creating a couple of units, then destroying your mobile base and choosing a new one. Which I think no one would bother doing.
The story, makes you wanna kill yourself.
IMO, the game feels way too short. Nowhere in the game I was actually immersed that I was actually playing C&C. Kane's role in the campaigns has been reduced to practically non-existantance. You don't see much of him, his sinister/badass and insidious yet majestic presence in the early C&C games are not portrayed at all in this campaign. There's no climax leading to the supposedly final battles in the campaigns in the final C&C. It's a plain flat road from start to end. And NOD's campaign is like half of GDI's.
Thought I could never find a C&C worse than C&C: Generals, but I guess C&C4 gets the trophy. Kane deserved more, Joe Kucan deserved more, C&C fans deserved more. In the end, this was just one epic rush job with an epic DRM. Amazingly, back in the DOS days where stuff like Photoshop, 3D software, video editing software were all at its infancy, the cinematics and FMVs 15 years ago in C&C1 were actually much better than this game's.
A little part of me died playing through the game. RIP Westwood.

Well thats okay because its also not westwood anymore...

It isn't. It's butt boring, you've only a few units to play with(variety and numbers) and you're forced into playing a single role.
They could have done more for the C&C fans, instead they puked in our faces, gave us an incredibly shitty DRM and laid off the C&C4 dev team.

Probably. I haven't tried it. But for a mutiplayer game that's more about teamwork between several players, and shorter more responsive games, playing a single role isn't a bad idea... like TF2 or any other class based fps. I can see how it might feel limiting to RTS veterans though, and in single player.
It doesn't seem like these changes are aimed at RTS vets or single player though... that's why it's weird that they did it for C&C4.

It was a very strange decision. If they just stuck with the same tried and tested C&C3 engine people would have been happier. Sure it would have been just more of the same but that would have been better than what they did here. After the money EA lavished on the whole C&C rebirth it seems very strange they decided to wind it down so quickly and completely. I would have expected them to get at least a few more expacks and RA4 out. I guess the simple fact is it didn't sell anywhere near as much as expected.
At least if they wanted to do something new they could have done a different game entirely. I little like what Creative Assembly did with Stormrise. It was an utterly rubbish game that thankfully was kept far away from the Total War name.

I can understand the desire to do something different and their approach could have been a good one if it wasn't for the always online requirement, completely shit and extremely limited single player, a unit cap that would make you think it's a 360 title and 95% of the content as unlockables.
The only really good idea was mobile bases. Never did understand why people never questioned the logic behind building factories 100 metres away from the front line.

A meta score of 69 (as of this post) for a supposed AAA+ game is really bad. Getting 2.8/10 average from more than 200 user reviews is even worse.
The backlash wouldn't have been anywhere near what it is if they hadn't called it a C&C game...

Well it's just a mechanic that makes the game possible. You're right it makes utterly no sense in the real world to train men, build tanks and conduct research right there on the battlefield but it does work in the context of the C&C and Craft games.The base building made sense in SupCom and to a lesser extent in Dawn of War (landing pads for drop pods/webway gates). TBH EA should have stuck with the base building in C&C just as Blizzard have with Starcraft 2. If it aint broken then don't try to fix it.
This move to online only with all the content being unlockable would have made sense if they were serious about pushing it as competitive online game. As the development team have been laid off that idea is thrown out the window because how many balance patches can be expected? C&C3 was up to v1.09 last time I checked and was still a long way from being balanced.