So, I've marathoned the campaign up to mission 20, which if the leaked mission count is true then I'm 2/3 of the way through the game. The planes feel very heavy, slow roll and not a lot of pull normally, but if you throw it into high G they suddenly pull at like 3x the rate. It makes it very hard to get good angles on targets, especially for guns (which I was already kind of bad at lmao). Missions seem kind of easy, not a whole lot of huge missions yet but maybe they pull out all the stops in the end stage of the campaign. The two SPW choices are neat but the lack of targets in a mission kind of kneecap how cool that system could have been. If we had AC6 scale missions I'd love this feature, but as it is it's kind of whatever.
Performance issues have been minimal but I have had some slowdowns (typically in cutscenes, but a couple of the explosion effects have also stuttered). I'm running a 5900x and 7900 xtx at 1440p, all ultra settings except for upscaling, which is set to balanced instead of quality. Game does at least look good. I'd rate the story/narrative thus far as being better than ace combat 7, but not as good as 4. Probably about as good as 0, but longer and with not as bombastic presentation. It's not as dumb as 5's story, though the wingmen are close to as bad as 5's. I like Coster the best because he talks the least. Your NPC allies are usually tolerable too.