I'm coming from having played Wingman, so I'm totally fine with stupid arcadey flight sim light...but the issue with this game is just simply kind of boring. Mission 3 is "blow up a bunch of ships" - over, and over, and over. There's not a lot of challenge, and not much of interest. There are virtually no real difficulty settings, it's just "arcade", "realistic" and "sim" but as many reviews point out, the game is balanced for infinite ammo and full speed all the time, so if you play on anything other than arcade it's just a boring mess.
I'm a lifelong PC gamer, barely play any console games, AND I played this with a keyboard & mouse- and I still had a ton of fun. It's definitely arcadey, physics doesn't mean a whole lot. It's sort of a shooting gallery game in some ways, you'll kill infinity more enemies than you get killed, but it does feel like a cool flying game. The planes handle really differently - when I finally could afford a prototype-type plane, the difference in handling was incredibly obvious. It's fun choosing the right plane for the mission based on how you like to play. It does have a console style "finish the mission or restart" thing, though most are 20-30 minute max. It's still frustrating when you run into the wing of an airship or something. I literally beat a level and accidentally rammed into the ground (there's no artificial horizon). It's a short game, but that feels nice. I'm a busy adult, I've finished a handful of games in the past few years, it's nice to be able to actually go from start to finish in less than a lifetime. I finished the campaign, I'll have to play with conquest mode next. It's sometimes a bit hard to follow the deeper metaplot too, which is mostly communicated through radio messages while you're trying not to get shot down, but it was still a well done story overall.
The game is really really promising, and must be a blast in multiplayer modes. There's a nice rock-paper-scissors mechanic and lots of tactical possibilities. Where it falls down for me is as a single player game - the computer is not subject to the same limitations as the human player, so they have infinite tanks, etc. Since your hardware is most definitely finite, this creates an absurd grind. It's especially silly when the background to the story is fighting an insurgency - surely a modern nation-state will be better outfitted than an insurgency. It very much seems as thought the campaign is a way to train you and accumulate points for use in the multiplayer, so if you a single-player only kind of person this is more of a 3 star game - fun to play for a bit, but gets frustrating, grindy and samey after not too long.
This game does indeed invite comparisons to Sid Meyer's Gettysburg, and is probably the closest game to be released. The game has a lot going for it - it is relatively simple, easy to pick up, and clearly is designed to be easy to play on a touch screen device, while having a lot more depth than one associates with tablet/mobile games. It's pretty fun, and I think the AI can sometimes be pretty decent. There's a nice flow to the campaign, though sometimes the areas you painstakingly took (at great cost) suddenly aren't under your control in the next phase of the battle, so you have to take them AGAIN but with battered units. On the other hand, it feels like a lot was sacrificed in order to maintain that compatibility with touch devices. You don't have any control over formations, which means there's no way to make sure your troops move faster towards the front lines (e.g. with a marching column formation). It's really difficult to do reliable group formations involving multiple units - they just don't move together or even really end up together. It's not clear whether it matters what path you choose your men to take towards a destination (do roads speed things up? Does terrain matter for movement?) There are also some strange aspects to the whole affair. They really stress the accuracy of the map, but its cartoony-ness and the limited zoom means that doesn't actually matter. It's often really hard to have even a basic sense of what line of sight will be for a unit. You're not sure whether your units will even use that rock wall that's on the map, or if its just decoration. They also seem to have detailed unit information, but it's not shared with you, so you just inexplicably have units that can shoot further than others with no clear explanation of why. I'm not a grognard that expects historical accuracy (though they need to expect that audience), but it all leads to a fairly confusing experience. Anyway, buy on sale if you miss SMG.
This was solid, enjoyable fun, but probably not the 5 stars that everyone seems to be putting. 3.5 would be most accurate. I'm used to computer based FPSs from recent era - lots of freedom, multiple ways to complete a task, etc (think Deus Ex, or Farcry), and this is almost the opposite - at times, it feels almost on rails as those old console shoot-em-ups with the plastic guns. The main challenge is replaying a set piece multiple times, and conserving enough ammo to the next pile of ammo. It's definitely a 'console' approach to an FPS more than a PC approach. I recommend choosing a slightly higher difficulty level than you might do normally. That said, it's a nice bit of fun - it feels like a console game for beer on the couch, no thinking necessary. It's well put together, it's entertaining, and hard to stop playing since it's so well paced. It's not the longest game in the world (but to be honest, one of the few GOGs that I've actually managed to complete from my library, since I normally buy for replayability.) The squad camaraderie is nice, though often where to put the squad members is less tactical and more "oh, there's a snipe spot there, better put someone on it and get their back." Also, I have zero interest in Star Wars I-III, so I wasn't sure we were the good guys till the final cut scene. Maybe if you're really into Star Wars it'd bump this up a couple of stars.
