Gates of Hell is a game thats a lot like being in an abusive relationship, at one side you absolutely love the look and feel, but at the other hand once you get to know its mostly just painful.

So let me just start off on the positive note here,

Atmosphere
the game itself is frankly beautiful, all the DLC's maps are extremely well made and very atmospheric with plenty of detail, the lightning in some maps is astonishing specially the winter maps, winter actually feels like winter, as someone born in the Arctic, its nostalgic and you can almost feel the cold damp wind on some maps.

Models
The game models are likewise, very well researched, extremely diverse and well detailed, for a strategy game its almost hard to understand how well the models are and they keep improving them and adding even more details which can be a detriment, more on that later.

Sounds
Often under looked in games, films and TV shows, but sound is arguably the most important aspect of them all, sound is the most immersive factor its what made games like STALKER and Half Life 2 so memorable, it was the sounds.

Gates of Hell is no exception, the sounds are exceptionally good, every gunshot feels impressive, very close to real life without your ears bleeding afterwards, a cannon firing even a 50mm sounds quite powerful as it should, a big field howitzer will deafen the entire battlefield and explosions are just as impressive with ricochet properly sounded, you can even hear artillery shells as they come down on you.

While that sounds fine and all, there is just way too much in the negative aspect to cover.

Performance
This game is poorly optimised, and a huge detriment to that may just be the game engine which dates back to 2005, and the excessive amount of details everything have, for a RTS game, its quite frankly unnecessary for tanks to have their insides modelled, impressive yes but from a gameplay aspect you almost never zoom in enough nor often enough to admire these features, to my understanding the developers are quite proud of this excessive details in the game.
Very few times have I heard anyone talk about the quality models however, because people are more interested in playing the game than to look at the models. The models however remain impressive to look at, but its unnecessary feature that ends up bogging the game down hard.

The AI
This is arguably the most important aspect for ANY RTS games, in GoH its a HUGE drawback, frankly its hard to recommend this game at all if you have any form of self-respect to your own time.
The AI which you fight against, is literally braindead, its so basic and so void of any strategical thinking its laughable, there games from the late 1990s that had more complex combat AI then this, Empire Earth for example had AI that would strategize best methods for attack, there no such thing in GoH.

Whats more obnoxious is your OWN infantry AI or tank AI are broken, the infantry AI in general can only target one enemy at a time, no I mean it, one enemy SOLDIER or TANK at a time, thats right, they are incapable of multiple target selection, such basic code is unavailable.
Another issue thats neck breaking is that tanks or any vehicle have weird target parameters, they will prioritise targets closest to it, regardless whether its a tank or infantry, thats fine but what if you have tanks shooting at your tank, but your tank decides to target infantry instead because its closer, thats a problem.

Another issue is tank destroyers randomly rotating 360 for no apparent reasons or positioning themselves sideways and refusing to return to their original position, turrets on tanks remain in their last position instead of facing forward which makes it very easy for enemies to destroy your tanks.

Infantry cannot even reliably use smoke nor AT weapons to target vehicles within range, trying to give commands to infantry only registers half the time, infantry will often run up to a tank and try to throw an AT grenade and then get gunned down before they are able to, infantry are also completely inept at moving around on their own, get into cover or throw smoke automatically, this game makes it all a manual process which is ridicules.

Even Korean RTS masters would struggle to control so many units all at the same time manually, it should not be necessary.

Because the AI is so broken, this game is best suited for short game sessions of 15 to 30 minutes in its two multiplayer modes, Domination or Battle Zones which is basically Capture Points.

The singleplayer is all over the place, some missions are well made, most are not however, extremely tedious smoke spamming and using snipers and field guns to plow your way through, because like I said the AI is extremely basic in this game, with that also comes with features like no suppression mechanic, no aiming delay, troops in this game have instant reaction time, 100% accuracy within 100 metres which by itself is ridicules and they all share a global vision system, no field of view for individual troops meaning artillery at the end of the map can somehow communicate with infantry dude at the other end which even CoH2 stopped doing.
And if you play on higher difficulties, the enemy AI gets more health AND tanks also gets more ARMOUR! And they do more damage against you, this is essentially just cheat mode for AI.

There is also a conquest mode which lets you fight AI on a quasi combat theatre where you attack, then defend, the maps you get to fight on are usually randomised, here you attack certain points on the theatre to gain resources or manpower etc this sounds brilliant but the AI basically just stays still on attack mode and they wont even chase you, on defensive mode, they throw everything they have at you in what can only be described as a zombie wave, there no strategy involved, its just pure unit spam, this gets real old after the 50th time.

At least in multiplayer PvE, the AI will indeed defend and attack in one battle which makes it a bit more engaging gameplay wise.

• Amazing sounds, good art direction makes this aesthetically pleasing to look at.
  
• AI is extremely basic, cheats a lot in higher difficulties makes it frustrating to play against.
  
• Way too many weird AI behaviours makes long game sessions frustrating and not fun.
  
• Most game modes are not fun to play, takes way too long and frustrating because of the poor AI design.
  
• Tedious micro management of everything, to avoid tank destroyers from rotating all the time, you have to turn off the engine, stupid way of dealing with game yank.
  
• Developers have promised AI improvement for multiple years, but spends more time making degrading community posts about how people should stop whining.
  
• Multiplayer PvP is difficult to play because of cheese and extremely bad network code which is tied to Steam Workshop servers, so if Steam goes down, GoH goes down. Almost all players are either from China or Russia, meaning you will constantly face players with 200+ ping.

Do I recommend this game? No, if you can get it on sale, thats different story, but for a full price there better ways to spend your time.
I do love the game concept, but as a video game its hard pill to swallow, the only fun I have in GoH is to play with friends, in short sessions that usually lasts maximum of 40 minutes, and we play maybe one or two a few days a week at most against AI on veterancy, in hardcore difficulty, the AI’s mortars for some reasons have 90% hit ratio, which may not sound too bad but remember in veterancy its only 30% meaning almost every shot will hit your infantry directly, I had one enemy mortar destroy my Tiger 1 because yes of course the mortar shell is now also more POWERFUL! If I wanted to play against cheaters this much, I just boot up BF1 or Hunt Showdown.