Well, I fired it up tonight and I must admit, the sp is much better than I'd anticipated. What surprises me most is the dog fights are actually quite fun, and the controls for the Jackal feel just right. I was also surprised I can play it on max settings, save for AA, which I have at 1 notch down from max. Though I DO have a few nit picks, the campaign so far feels pretty good.
OK, now to my gripes.
1. I've never seen a game so littered with load screens. No they're not lengthy ones like in HL2, but they cram them in everywhere. Walk halfway into a small hospice outpost, loadscreen..., back to outpost. Upon completing one of the missions protag says "Mission ac... loadscreen, ...complished". I even got a couple halfway through cutscenes, and one in the middle of opening a peek-or-kick door. I don't know about you, but it's downright immersion breaking. They could have at least placed them less obtrusively.
2. Two or three times attempting to launch some of the side missions resulted in a black screen. I tried both exiting game, then rebooting. Eventually they worked properly. I also noticed you can get a different percentage of mission success rating without having played any in between checking the mission screen each time, which makes no sense.
3. How the heck do you access the armory on the Retribution? I keep getting a popup to check out my upgrades there, but I can't seem to find how to access it. I guess they mean the loadout screen upon taking missions, which isn't my idea of visiting an armory. It makes the Retribution feel small.
4. Several times I've come upon those small rooms you hack into for upgrades, only to find a worse weapon than the one I have (pistol vs assault rifle). I try to pick up any new weapon I see just to unlock it, but unless it's better, I always want to switch back to the one I had. However in these upgrade rooms, often times the one I switched from suddenly can't be found after switching.
5. Cutscenes have some of the best modeling I've seen, but they play a bit hitchy, while the game doesn't.
6. In game textures are a mix of fairly good, to pretty bad, even on max settings.
7. The campaign actually does feel pretty short. I'm already at the point where I've killed all but 5 of the 32 Most Wanted list in just one evening session of play. Now that would be acceptable were I only playing main missions, but as it now stands, there are no side missions showing, and just the Operation Black Flag main mission.
8. The campaign offers little reward for exploration. Not really any collectibles to speak of, and upgrades are same old scenario in finding them.
That said, again, these are more nit picks than major deal breakers. It's only the constant load screens and missions sometimes not launching I find extremely annoying and baffling. Now if these loadscreens with yellow horizontal bars are only happening if you have say 3GB VRAM or less like I do, I still find it strange. I'd rather wait for the game to pre-cache textures before starting a mission, than have those scattered all over the place.
The game definitely has it's fun moments though. Just the grenades alone are quite interesting, and offer great effects. I'd give it maybe a 7.5/10. If not for the loadscreens, missions not loading sometimes, and short length, I'd say maybe 8/10.
Oh, almost forgot. I didn't have the crash I was asking about in the Burn Water mission, but I also kept the default Jackal skin and weapons, as a couple people said they were able to avoid the bug that way. In fact I've used default loadout every time. Next play through I'll experiment with custom ones.
