Big Guns Starcraft has very unique unit design, with very distinct differences between the races. In Total Annihilation, you are hard pressed to really tell the difference between the two enemies and they seem to be almost mirror images of each other, with slight differences in each unit's shape and weapon damage. With experience it becomes easier to differentiate your units and their enemy counterparts. Starcrafts units are colourful, interesting, and have some pretty cool animations. However, the pixel based sprites limits the potential, whereas the realtime 3D rendering of TA allows for some interesting varieties to the look and feel of battle.
Buildings explode in a variety of different ways, scattering scrap metal far and wide.
We would have loved to see this game with a bit of 3D hardware support, as we can just imagine how much more beautiful this game would have been driven by a voodoo2, voodoo3 or an ATI Rage 128 card. An additional feature that makes this game stand out is the ability to set your view of the battle field to a much higher resolution if your setup allows for it. I would highly recommend taking advantage of this, as its a nice touch to be able to see a much larger area of the battle field. Setting the resolution to the max makes the units rather small, but you see a vast increase in acreage. This is why 3d is such a brilliant touch for this top down, isometric RTS game.