Okay I finally finished it, comments:
It was a pretty fun campaign with lots of new ships and so forth. Some of the new ships were hit and miss. Well most of Trashman's ships were fun to fly but like the Perseus DH or whatever, what's the point? I'll just fly the Falcon instead. The HoL ships are of course cool though the HLCv seems to be missing its subsystems?? Or at least I tried to target it's engines once and could target nothing but turrets. Still cool to see some ships from OTT being used and they work pretty well though the Carrier's not my favourite design. Oh hey I'll do the NGMT style:
The Good:
-Varied missions and lots of them.
-Cool new ships
-pretty free of spelling errors and so forth at this point
The Bad:
-Some of the missions could've been a bit more varied. Most of the missions the player was essentially in an interceptor squadron. There weren't too many bomber or heavy assault missions. And did the Ares get changed? I thought it had a higher missile load.
-Some missions were big beam fests that the player had little to no control over. Like the Mjolnir defence mission. Or some of the capital ship battles. It can look pretty cool but at the same time there's so much beam fire flying around I don't know what's going on and then the mission is done 30 seconds in and I'm jumping out somewhere else.
-Some missions were a bit hard in their difficulty and required me to pull rabbits out of a hat. Which isn't so much bad, but it's just odd for command to complain about my performance when any normal human couldn't be held accountable. Like the escort mission where you're bringing a convoy through an asteroid field and then some Carrier jumps in. So then singlehandidly I have to shoot down most of the bombers, and disarm pretty much every facing weapon on the carrier before it blows the convoy to pieces (as its beams and plasma cannons will make short work of anything). I just think it would be better if Command assumed I was one of the normal peeps.
-Some of the ships could've used waypoints. Like the final mission for example didn't even have waypoint paths for the ships (or maybe they end at some point) so the two ships close and then make these jarring movements that go with any "attack ship" order given to capital ships.
-I miss slash beams. Where'd they all go?
-Essentially I think what I'm saying is that a lot of the missions were cool, but they could've used a little a more scripting. Like instead of having five ships all open up with beams at once, you can stagger their beam free sexps so that it's just more visually interesting (to me anyway). Think to Bear Baiting right, if the mission opened with the Phoenix or whatever it's called opening up and the Sathanas opening up at the same time 5 seconds in, it would've been a bit lame. But instead you get some frantic comchatter, the anticipation, and then the Sathanas opens up and the ship gets wasted (or magically saved the case may be).
The Bugs:
-I got a bonus objective in the aforementioned escort mission for pulling all the ships through okay even though I lost one.
-During the Sizifus deployment mission, I got some magic egg for no reason. I just deploy, said I get an egg, and then there's something about the inquisition and wierd noises going on and I don't know what the deal is. Also in that mission I get a bad debrief for letting the AWACs leave the area even though I destroyed the radar array so they had no reason to complain.
Anyway it was some good fun.
