Well, I just finished the campaign this evening, and I must say, it's absolutely fabulous.
Some highlights:
Atmosphere - The campaign perfectly captured the FS1 feel... I felt like I was playing a classic FS1 campaign like Cardinal Spear or Awakenings. It was almost epic. The missions, aside from being stellar in their own right, also captured wonderfully the pre-beam era feel of cruiser-vs.-cruiser engagement, convoy assault and defense, fighter skirmish, and so forth. I'm glad you're on TVWP, because this is exactly how I'd like the main war missions to feel.
Missions - Virtual perfection. I found only one spelling mistake ("all right" is two words) and one design error (it's possible to destroy the Throckmorton the first time you see it if you disable it quickly) in the entire campaign, which is so far and above practically any other project I've seen released that it's in a design class by itself. The story was rich and compelling, and the gameplay was loads of fun. The only gripe I have is minor - some of those missions are hard! I had to replay a couple of them several times, and that can get frustrating when you have to wade through all those messages again. But the fun factor more than outweighs the balance factor.
SCP - I feel vindicated! Here at last is a great campaign that extensively makes use of all kinds of new SCP features, many of which I added wondering if any campaign other than TVWP or MG would use them. This campaign is the rousing endorsement I dared not hope for.
Persistent variables were used to great effect with the Makara, and I saw numerous examples of the new sexps: distance-ship-subsystem, explosion-effect, play-sound-from-file, set-cargo, set-ship-position, set-ship-facing, ship-stealthy, friendly-stealth-invisible, change-ai-class, and probably a host of others I missed. I was also thrilled to finally see in-game-cutscenes done - and done
well. (Though I have to ask... did you try using toggle-hud to get rid of the hud?) Finally, the squad logos on the enemy wings was a great touch, one that makes so much sense it's easy to miss if you don't know it's a new feature.
Thanks, BR. Thanks for making a great campaign, and thanks for making the SCP look good at the same time.
