I finally got around to playing this game and it is simply fantastic, my expectations were high because of all the claims made by the community and they STILL were exceeded.
The combat is what you would expect from an AC game but a few things stand out, especially if you care about the score:
AC missions have time limits, this means you are incentivized to down priority targets and side objectives as efficiently as possible to maximize the score, racing against the clock.
This has the side effect of the objectives needing to be left intact as much as possible, so that the player can destroy them and hog the score, which leads to your squadron feeling like props that exist to praise your skill and tell you how god-like you are, they may sometimes down an enemy or 2 if you REALLY sit back and watch, but otherwise they are pretty hands off.
PW missions however do not have time limits, instead you are in company of a capable squadron that WILL down the objective by themselves if you run off and only do side-objectives.
This has 2 effects:
1. It makes you feel like you are actually a stand out element in a group of sentient beings.
2. It forces you to be ruthlessly efficient in your targetting approach, turning your squadron into the time limit, making it feel like a competition between you and them, which fits the mercenary background of your unit and I think that's pretty cool.
[h2]Story:[/h2]
The story strikes you as the typical "war bad" tale but the delivery of the message tapping into the loss of humanity, both physical and metaphorical, only gets stronger and stronger mission after mission, all the way until it climaxes into nothingness. By the end, it had a stronger impact on me than I had expected it would, especially those last lines of text, massive props to the VAs aswell, spot on delivery all the time.
I went through all the logs to understand the world better and I REALLY appreciate the amount of thougt that went into the world building, parallels to real world that feel all too familiar and the exploration of certain themes or well...as much as it can be done from the PoV of a mercenary fighter.
Note: The entry for the "Sea of the Scar" is the same as the entry for the "Federation Mainland", there are also a few spelling errors and Galaxy's entry at one point goes "Unfortunately Kaiser has realized that Galaxy is stuck with him as opposed to the other way around" and I'm pretty sure it's supposed to mean "Unfortunately Kaiser realized that he is stuck with Galaxy as opposed to the other way around", since it's made clear that it is Galaxy's personality that is a foil to Kaiser's.
[h2]Reflections on WSO:[/h2]
I initially thougt "man it would've been great if AC had an actual talking WSO" but then I realized if I wanted to keep Prez chiming in from time to time, my aircraft selection was limited to about 20% of the entire catalogue.
Don't get me wrong, if you offered me 2 universes in which in 1 we have PW without Prez and one with, I will ALWAYS pick the one WITH Prez, I just think that there should've been more 2 seaters just to keep her around, or only have 2 seaters so she is a mainstay for the entire thing, it's one of this game's stand out features, especially since she also interacts with the other members, adding to the feeling of camaraderie that binds Sicario together.
[h2]THE SOUNDTRACK AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH[/h2]
A good metric to judge whether a soundtrack complements the game is to see if, listening to a song, your mind travels back to that moment in the game, you know how if you played AC7 and you think of or hear Daredevil, you remember the shields going down [strike]and the incessant bleeping of the missile warning[/strike]?
All that is to say is that Jose Pavli absolutely knocked it out of the park.
[h2]Conclusion[/h2]
All in all, a definite recommendation, not just for the price, which is already an absurd value proposition, but it just is straight up a fantastic flight combat game, absolutely a must play for AC fans of course, but also a great starting point for newer players that would like to get into this genre because of the aforementioned competent squadron and lower price tag.
