Finished COW, here are my thoughts:
Fun campaign. It was nice to play something new (for me since as I did not play the one released in 2002) in a time where not many things are being released.
Ship/Weapon design was innovative, the banshee X must have been the most fun I've had taking out subsystems. They seem to fit into canon nicely.
The Ironhide's class of ship (Agamemnon?) was a unique surprise. Its star wars style laser turrets looked cool in broadside attacks.
I did not know I had to scan the Isis transport until it warped out. Was a subtle thing to catch in the directives text at the last minute late at night. Perhaps I was just being thick headed.
Those Vasudan stealth fighters were something else. Interesting fight trying to find them and stop them from attacking allies.
The campaign featured some other innovative game play ideas, like tracking the Isis in the nebula to find the queb.
Voice acting is a big plus in my book, borderline requirement. Well, it's pretty important anyways. Great that you all completed it. Some of the dialogue near the end was pretty good with the Agrippa for example. Final Debrief was good.
The background is technically implemented much like how Freespace2 originally did it. I like this layout and I prefer it to the newer method of having a large monochromatic field of gas that drapes half a skyboxes background. I can tell much care was put into the layout of the .bmps which were numerous and spanned the 360 degree view. Backgrounds were cool, especially the planets.
Two significant bugs slowed my game progress down:
In the mission CAS-3 the first time after completing all directives, the Ironhide jumps without letting me dock with it, thus I could not end the mission. It seemed to happen for no reason. I was left hanging in the nebula and was forced to restart the mission.
In the mission CAS-7 The vasudan destroyer did not jump out. even though all objectives were complete. This ship is guardianed at 1% so the nearby Terran destroyers just kept pinging away at it. When I set the mission at 64X time compression, I knew something was wrong. No directives and no results. I guess I might have completed the objectives out of order since I was a bomber, but I don't really know. Must have something to do with the Vasudan destroyer's departure cue.
All around nice experience. The campaign has a little of that Volition made style/feel to it which was somewhat refreshing to find.
