Ok, so here's a little more positive light.
I hopped into Arena Commander, which wasn't laggy as ****, thankfully. Of course I still couldn't use my joystick, but the game makes a reasonable showing with just the mouse and keyboard. Yes, I checked, you have to hold Alt-S to go backwards, which is dumb, but whatever.
I made it through about 8 waves on my first try. The enemy AI is very dumb, but hey, so is most AI, so I can't knock SC for that. What I can say is that the shooting was pretty fun. It's nowhere near as polished or tight as E:D or Freespace, but it's serviceable.
Positives:
- Pretty, even on low it's not terrible looking.
- Newtonian flight capability.
- Fun and serviceable, if very basic, combat.
- Ships can be damaged in individual components, which can affect weapon systems.
- Complex system controls, adjusting radar range and differential shield management is cool.
Negative:
- HUD is a mess - hard to read, doesn't convey information well, just overall pretty bad.
- Radar is usable but bad.
- Sound is annoying and bad. Pew pew pew pew, quite literally.
- Ships felt a little floaty.
- Ship damage does not seem to otherwise affect performance.
- Stupid controls.
- Complex system controls that don't really have relevance in AC.
- Still haven't figured out the energy management system. Do I only get to set priority to one system or equalize it?
I feel like AC is a serviceable example of what Star Citizen was trying to be. It's like they got about 1/2 to 3/4 of the way to creating a space combat game, then got distracted and let it languish. If they put maybe another 6 months of development into it, they would have a nice game that could rival Elite Dangerous: Arena.
Basically it's the first 3/4 of what CRoberts originally pitched: a no-nonsense space combat game with realistic thruster locations affecting ship design. Unfortunately, the thruster thing didn't really make it in. I like how ships can be chewed apart with location based damage. But...yea, unfortunately I don't think this area of the game will ever be finished, because they're so intent on making this ****ty MMO and motion captured cutscenes.