Pros: It's a simcade air combat game. If you're a fan of especially the holy trinity of Ace Combat (4, 5, Zero), the game will feel very familiar and pleasant to play, as the devs have obviously put a lot of work into making the flying and level design enjoyable. Graphics and audio are also quite good, at least on the level of AC7, and the game seems well optimized, keeping a good framerate on medium-level hardware. Separates itself from AC with addition of more varied and useful special weapons, allies that actually do something, a story more in keeping with the amount of ass you kick (You won't be called a rookie for nearly half the game as you rampage through enemy aircraft), and the fact that you have an actual WSO who talks when you're flying a 2-seater,

Cons: My largest gripes with this game all do with bugs or weird dev decisions that could probably be put down to PW being a game made by very few people, funded by a Kickstarter campaign. There are occasional errors in the game's text, some of the voice acting is... interesting, voice lines are repeated a lot, etc. There's also a frustrating inability to skip line-by-line in cutscenes (although there is an option to skip entire scenes) and for some reason the menus are navigated by cursor only, instead of being able to use cursor and item-by-item selection.

I, specifically, also experience moments where the game drops to 1-2 FPS and AI scripts like target lock go haywire for a few seconds, but I assume if this was a more widespread issue it would have been reported and fixed by now, so expect the game to feel well optimized on your hardware.

Overall: I am a big fan of the Ace Combat series and when I heard about PW's development in 2018 I put it on my radar, but full disclosure, I didn't back it on Kickstarter. I can say now that I've played it that it's a lot better than I expected given the resources used to make it, and honestly I'd rate it above the current latest Ace Combat (7) which I already thought was quite good. As stated at the top, if you're a fan of simcade flight games, consider picking this up, especially right now when it's kind of competing with Star Wars Squadrons (which has very bad flight controls) and nothing else. For me, it's a solid 9/10 at the moment, which could be bumped up to a perfect score by fixing of some minor issues.

Pros: It's a simcade air combat game. If you're a fan of especially the holy trinity of Ace Combat (4, 5, Zero), the game will feel very familiar and pleasant to play, as the devs have obviously put a lot of work into making the flying and level design enjoyable. Graphics and audio are also quite good, at least on the level of AC7, and the game seems well optimized, keeping a good framerate on medium-level hardware. Separates itself from AC with addition of more varied and useful special weapons, allies that actually do something, a story more in keeping with the amount of ass you kick (You won't be called a rookie for nearly half the game as you rampage through enemy aircraft), and the fact that you have an actual WSO who talks when you're flying a 2-seater, Cons: My largest gripes with this game all do with bugs or weird dev decisions that could probably be put down to PW being a game made by very few people, funded by a Kickstarter campaign. There are occasional errors in the game's text, some of the voice acting is... interesting, voice lines are repeated a lot, etc. There's also a frustrating inability to skip line-by-line in cutscenes (although there is an option to skip entire scenes) and for some reason the menus are navigated by cursor only, instead of being able to use cursor and item-by-item selection. I, specifically, also experience moments where the game drops to 1-2 FPS and AI scripts like target lock go haywire for a few seconds, but I assume if this was a more widespread issue it would have been reported and fixed by now, so expect the game to feel well optimized on your hardware. Overall: I am a big fan of the Ace Combat series and when I heard about PW's development in 2018 I put it on my radar, but full disclosure, I didn't back it on Kickstarter. I can say now that I've played it that it's a lot better than I expected given the resources used to make it, and honestly I'd rate it above the current latest Ace Combat (7) which I already thought was quite good. As stated at the top, if you're a fan of simcade flight games, consider picking this up, especially right now when it's kind of competing with Star Wars Squadrons (which has very bad flight controls) and nothing else. For me, it's a solid 9/10 at the moment, which could be bumped up to a perfect score by fixing of some minor issues.