After two days of playing and finishing the first half of Blue Planet: War in Heaven and after I've heard that the makers would like to read some reviews together with some morale support I decided to write down my thoughts on the campaign so far. I'll try to spoil nothing but my impression. If you think I should put some things into spoiler tags, please let me know.
The obvious things come first: The new combat AI is a dream. I love the usual Freespace AI for its appearance in dogfights, but this new AI forces the player to follow strict orders or to be killed. You can't just leave your wing behind and kill a bunch of fighters on your own like it is possible using the normal Freespace AI. If you do so, you're lost and your death is only a matter of time. I'm not the best pilot, but still a skilled one and thought to know how to fight, but in WiH I learned to skip my experience the hard way. This new AI is deadly as hell itself and made me bite my desk a few times. This new AI is also impressive and doesn't lack any parts of the combat scenery I'm used to face when playing with the usual AI. You can't just target a ship and fire your missiles from the distance and see your target explode a few seconds later. You also have to keep watching your team mates. If they get into a fight with more than just one fighter they are lost when you don't make it to lure the enemy ships away. The new AI is good, but it's still just an AI, so you have to interfere the enemy. With the atmosphere this campaign offers you feel guilty for each wing mate you've lost.
This brings me straight to the atmosphere itself of the campaign. In Freespace you can either kill the atmosphere by making the player's side the always ruling one, or you create an atmosphere the BP team already did it in AoA, where you never knew where you were standing, and improve it like in WiH. AoA already showed a story concept as dramatic as I've could ever imagined. Not even the original FS2 campaign was that dramatic. You entered a universe so familiar but also so unknown and after everything seems to be solved you see that your entire existance was built on wrong intentions and pure lies. This also improves in WiH. You seem to be on the side that appears to be the losing one. After many battles you see that you could finally strike back with full force just to see that you've been lured into a trap planned and organised for months and you had no idea of. The entire first half appears to be a drama, but then there's still the secret that remains unknown and unexplained to you. This campaign's not just showing off mission based drama, but also drama regarding the persons sitting in the other cokpits. As the player you also get the chance of interacting with enemy combatants which is quite thrilling. I liked it much. The RPG elements by choosing the topic for discussion also was a cool idea. Really, continue this way.
And with this I think I can switch to the effects. I only can say WHOA!
Bombs coming from subspace is something I never could have imagined. I was lost the first time they appeared. It took some time for me to think about what just happened and how. The first time I was shot because of this. Many effects are brought to us by the new mediavps, but the BP team requested many features to be placed within the MVPs and also put many into WiH.
So from overal gameplay I want to say the following.
I'm a simple player of Freespace and you guys earn my deep respect for this campaign.
But I'm also a mission designer working for another company you maybe already heard from. From this point of view you guys have achieved something that is impossible for me to do, because we lack the opportunities and functionalities to do that. I wish, I really wish this would be possible for the game I worked on. Really guys, thank you so much for this beatiful and challenging campaign.
My criticism I already posted in the chat, so I don't want to post them here again!
