I played it for a couple hours and kept coming across some glaring problems which lowered my opinion of the game a little bit. Still going to buy it, but some of these are pretty annoying and seem like something -any- betatester would've found on the first day.
1: No matter how good you are, no matter how many planes you shoot down, and no matter how perfectly you follow the waypoints and mission objectives, you
will fail every single campaign mission. The campaign missions also don't track your kills or give you medals or anything else like the il2 campaigns. It was kind of annoying because on the first mission I shot down 3 do17s, and two stukas on the next mission (pretty good considering I'm a piss-poor fighter pilot), yet there was no recognition of my ace status, and the mission briefings still had my character as the "sheepish naive newbie that can't do anything right and has no friends".
2: All variants of the BF-109 have the rear elevators set up 5 degrees. This means that you will always be fighting against that, and the second you let go of your stick your 109 will shoot up into the sky. I hope this gets fixed soon as it is a huge problem and I have no idea how it got past any testers.
3: Quick missions, etc. The menus are a mess and are inferior in every way to the original il2 mission menus. Custom loadouts, etc are impossible to use in single player.
4: There is definitely slowdown over cities. Slow, but still mostly playable. Still managed to shoot down a hurricane while I was flying a stuka over a city.
5: Some planes feel really hyperactively twitchy, but this might just be me and my ancient cheapo attack 3 joystick (doesn't even have twist grr). I was flying the spitfire in one mission and I could barely get a bead on anything because the second I touched my joystick it would fly way past where I wanted to adjust. Hurricane handles alright for me, bf110 handles great, and I love the way bombers handle, which is good because I'm actually a good bomber pilot (but
not a bombardier
)!
Multiplayer is definitely going to be the main attraction for this game.
Overall, it's still fun, but it needs a little work.