Bought it. So, how does it stands next to his older brother? Well it's not as good, sadly.
The whole "fly around and talk to people passing by in mission to get... missions is nice", the visuals are stuning, but the rest is too arcadish.
Now you have power ups, you can't fine-tune your plane ( you can upgarde it when you have a certain number of crisom skies items, wheeee... ), you can't target lock anymore, your main guns have unlimited ammo, and each plane comes with it's own set of weapons: one primary, one secondary, that you cannot change ( bybye my loved flak rockets
).
Additionally, you have preset maneuvers ( a combinaison of the two sticks will engage an himelman turn, for exemple ), which is pretty useless ( makes the thing faster than you would do, sure, but that's... well... ).
The setting is werid, quite too futuristic for CS, imho. Granted, I don't know the original platform game, but that storm inducing device, that giant mechanical spider out of wild wild west, those streamlined zeppelins, they don't really fit.
The missions are far from being as original as in the original, too.
Does it suck? Still, no. Piloting the planes is a real pleasure, being able to take control of various types of turrets ( on towers, on the pandora, on a boat, etc ) is nice, the repair hangar is a nice touch ( tho rendered useless because of the life powerups that won't cost you money ), it's very cool being able to steal the landed planes, and the dogfights are fun as hell ( tho harder because there's no target lock anymore ).
But I miss the ladder stunts, the photos when you go through some tricky terrain formation. I miss the wingmen ( seems you never get more than one, and he seems pretty useless, when the ones in the original had the most impressive AI I've ever seen in a flight sim of any kind ). I miss the funny briefings that set the mood perfectly. And I surely miss how you came to love your plane after hours of flying on it.
Voila.
