Just finished WC4. I ended up bumping the difficulty down to Ace, and even then it was pretty tough. Anyway, it's a great game and a good way to cap off Blair's story. Reading a guide, I can see that some of the alternate "story paths" are just fluff and you're locked into defecting to the Border Worlds regardless, but it's all still very impressive considering how expensive the FMVs were. The plot was entertaining, I liked the characters, the actresses were good-looking - no complaints about the story or cutscenes. The ending can't really match the climactic appeal of WC2's duel with Prince Thrakhath or WC3's planetary nuke (Seether was a complete non-character; I didn't realize until reading the game guide after the fact that he was the retard in the bar at the very beginning of the game, and his duel doesn't even get its own music track like Thrakhath), but the debate was pretty cool.
That said, I think I like the mechanics of the "2D" WC games (1, 2, Privateer) over the "3D" ones (3, 4). I don't like how afterburner drifting is removed and replaced with autosliding. Autosliding is cool and all, but it doesn't feel like a satisfying trick like drifting. You can do some cool tricks with autosliding and gain some maneuverability, but it feels like shit when you're in a ship that can't autoslide and all of that maneuverability is locked off to you. How come the Arrow and Banshee can autoslide, but not the Hellcat? In the "2D" games, your ability to drift is naturally extended from your ship's weight, but in the "3D" games, it's an arbitrary choice as to whether or not a ship has autosliding capabilities.
I also HATE how it's nearly impossible to hit enemies piloting light fighters on harder difficulties without missiles. I'm sure there's some kind of trick to it, but from what I've read, people just cheese the AI on harder difficulties. I never felt like I had to resort to such a thing in WC1 and 2, even in the brutally hard expansion packs.
I'll probably go play and complete Privateer or Prophecy whenever I get around to it, but it looks like this is the end of my time with the "main" WC games. I'm glad I didn't listen to some of the people telling me to skip WC altogether and play Freespace instead. I had fun with all of these games, and I can recommend WC3 in particular to anyone casually interested in the space sim genre. It's a real shame Chris Roberts killed the franchise with his shitty fucking movie that had worse writing and casting than the video game FMV cutscenes (lol), but at least WC4 completed Blair's story in a satisfying way.
