Okay, so after playing through Tenebra a few more times, I finally feel like I can offer a bit more than, "I liked it, it was good, MOAR PLZ," even though that would be the overall impression. This may not make much sense, but I was finding myself liking and disliking different sides of the same thing. Let me explain:
I don't think enough good things can be said about how much this community has done with such an old engine; if someone would have told me, back when I was playing the original FS games, that one day a bunch of crazed fans would constantly update the graphics, models, and the engine so that we would get things like tower defense, I probably would have laughed. This has been said by quite a few people already, but while I enjoyed the departure from vanilla missions, there might have been just a tad too much of it. Or, perhaps it's more a problem of being extremely concentrated. Other campaigns have had unconventional missions, but they were usually sprinkled among more traditional fare. It's like icing on a cake. Icing is tasty, but too much of it in one place, without finding a balance, will overpower the cake. In Tenebra's case, it was actually almost like eating a whole bowl of icing. That being said, at no point did I feel like the BP team was trying to make Freespace into something that isn't Freespace - having effective assets at your disposal, calling in tanks to act as makeshift sentries, or taking the helm of a (albeit small) cruiser is still stuff blowing up in space. All of those mechanics tried to make stuff blowing up in space more interesting, rather than trying to take the focus elsewhere, which is actually pretty important.
The exposition dumps didn't really bother me. I'm not sure how anyone who played the previous releases didn't come into Tenebra expecting anything else. We get to see a lot of plot threads coming together, but that brings me to one of my complaints. It almost feels like TOO many plot threads all come together in the short space of a few missions. There are still a hell of a lot of unresolved questions about exactly what is going on with the Shivans, Vishnans, Brahmans, the Great Darkness, and whatever "Grand Design" we're playing a part in, but a lot of personal threads for Noemi become much more...tidy. It almost feels like the only thing left to do is blow up the GTVA, get info pooped onto us like a statue in a park full of pigeons on why this whole thing happened in the first place, Noemi reunites with Simms, cats and dogs start living together, mass hysteria ensues, etc (note: I don't actually expect this is what will happen, but in the absence of knowledge about what's coming next, one might be able to excuse that particular line of thought).
I've seen a lot of people comment that Noemi is a lot less sympathetic this time around. Personally, I saw a person dealing with significant losses learning to compartmentalize, and learning to hate after growing up knowing very little of it. But one thing I will say is that it certainly didn't feel like as much of a roller coaster ride, at least for me. The high point, for me, was asploding the Carthage (screw you, Lopez), but there really weren't any lows to make the highs more significant. WiH 1 was absolutely beautiful in this regard. Eagerness turned defeat turned desperation turned hope turned almost-triumph turned emotional-Falcon-punch-in-the-dick. WiH 2...well, I know you're now a part of an alarmingly effective but somehow still secret organization, and everything you touch turns to gold. You cut through the GTVA like a hot knife through butter. Oddly enough, Noemi herself even muses that the weak link in all plans is human, but we never actually get to play the weak link. CASSANDRA is nigh-infallible and all the Fedayeen's plans go off without much of a hitch. It's actually sort of amusing to me now - I just got through reading the thread started by FSF about how BP forgot BP and I remember something about how WiH 2 was trying to avoid "Alpha 1" syndrome by mixing up the formula, but I felt it was really WiH 1 that averted it and now we've gone a few steps back. WiH 1 was powerful to me because we, as the players, rarely taste failure and hopelessness. It would have been nice to see at least a few things go wrong, even if they weren't catastrophic.
Edit: remembered the thread title doesn't say spoilers, added spoiler tags!
