I recommend this game for some quick and simple dogfighting fun, and/or if you have time to spare, but no emotional or mental investment available.
For me it was an impulse decision, based on the fact I wanted to play a plane game, I didn't have a dedicated one yet, and this was on sale. For this use-case it is ideal.
It runs crazy well, even on an office laptop. On a different computer, I got 400 frames on a 1050 Ti.
There's mods in the workshop (which are typically either reskins or unbalanced by vanilla standards, but still really fun), and a split screen co-op mode to have a damn good time with.
I don't believe I'll stop playing this game in the near future.
[b]BUT[/b]
There are so many small issues with this game, that annoy me more the longer I play.
[i]-The enemies tend to cluster in certain, seemingly somewhat randomly chosen areas later, which causes massive problems for anything that can't outrange them, later in the game, because the swarm will tear you to shreds like angry piranhas.
-Sometimes certain mission targets simply commit to spiting the earth itself, and as such cause trouble with their ritual self-sacrifice. The mission still counts as completed, at least.
-Some weapon stats are misleading, or falsely stated, and actual details regarding weapon functions are not given in the game itself.
-As with the previous: Some upgrades do not affect some weapons in certain ways, despite the game telling you they do.
-And you can double load on a weapon type. This does not reliably double the ammunition you have available for that weapon. With some it does, and with some, like my go-to, you go from three to four, for double the cost.
-There is a cockpit view, but all cockpit elements block the HUD, as it is likely overlaid in the distance, and so keeping track of enemies, or reliably dropping bombs, or reading distances of things directly ahead of you, is nigh impossible when not in third person.
-The game lets you earn tokens to buy a "headstart" into the campaign. Yes, you will start at a later point, but you will have very few resources, and be either slightly, or extremely underpowered, relative to the enemy scaling.
-For some odd reason, on multiple devices now, the game occasionally decides, that it does not want to take controller inputs anymore. My dualshock just doesn't work anymore, and my flight sticks only work halfway, or not at all. I can usually fix this by reconnecting the controller, but it's bad this can happen while in a dive, or otherwise during a mission.
-You can't adjust most of the settings once out of the main menu. This includes keybinds and graphics.
-The music volume adjustment does not work reliably until a reload of the scene/game. If you enable it after loading a save, it often doesn't play at all, except for brief snippets of two seconds at seemingly random times.
-It seems like a lot of stuff, that could and should have been ironed out long before they concluded development.
-Oh, and the enemy catalogue, that only updates after you've killed something, is at best a bad model viewer, because it doesn't tell you stats, and has very little flavour text. There was an attempt, but it was half hearted at most.[/i]
I like this game, I enjoy it a lot, but it has some very rough edges to deal with.
