I had very high hopes for Career Mode; mating the core fight sim with some generated direction, a “tech tree” style of certifications, plane wear, tear, and maintenance, and various activities to qualify for (or ignore!) seemed like a great leap forward.
After a few months of trying, several restarts, I can’t believe that Career Mode was released in the state it’s in. I would be embarrassed to release something like this.
- Mission flow is horrendous. If you’re lucky you get the “hold short box” somewhere only odd instead of inaccessible. If you call for clearances too early or late, you’re lucky if it only gives you a performance penalty instead breaking the entire mission flow. It’s great to be unable to finish a mission because the parking spot is inside a tree that crashes your plane.
- Dialogue is horrendous. There just isn’t enough dialogue to justify the use of the AI voice engine; for $100 someone on Fivrr could record all the lines in a day and have time for lunch and a nap. For the parts that have variables, even the slightest tweak to that AI voice engine to recognize a decimal point in a frequency would make a world of difference.
- Mission scoring is horrendous. There’s no way to know what the criteria actually is, and no way to know how to improve. Somehow in the last week the goals even stopped RENDERING. Instead we get placeholder text. Aviator performance is similarly opaque. I missed a radio call (because the hold short point was in an empty field a quarter nm from the runway) and was more heavily penalized than bouncing the plane into a taxiway on landing.
- Flight planning is horrendous. Some missions have waypoints that can’t be deleted. Some decide to stack all the waypoints in one spot. You can’t load plans from the planner. And if you do manage, through all of the bugs and limitations, to make a modified flight plan, there’s a good chance it’ll completely break the mission flow.
- Aircraft maintenance is horrendous. Nothing seems to matter aside from landing gear, in either terms of performance or wear. Run that engine way beyond the redline; it doesn’t matter. But you should repair things every fight and always load full fuel because once you have left the hangar there’s no way back. Find a bad tire during preflight? Forgot to add enough fuel? Anything else wrong (there won’t be, but still)? Too bad; once you leave the hangar it locks behind you and everyone inside has their headphones on. What?
- The animations are horrendous. How does the massive amount of late loading, pop in, and bouncing make it through any sort of approval? My passengers walking from their invisible (until a few seconds later) car looks like someone’s first Unreal Engine project. Skydivers changing suit colors once they’re clear of the plane is just embarrassing.
- It inexplicably breaks other parts of the game! When I leave Career Mode (usually in frustration these days) to do some Free Flight, I’m occasionally locked out of changing livery, planes, or fuel loads. I have to completely restart the game sometimes!
I understand Career Mode is a new, complex feature, but I can’t fathom it being released in this state. Any casual player who came to the game for this mode, and any serious player who was briefly interested in a more structured environment will be uniformly turned off.
In the end, Career Mode feels like a bullet point rather than a feature. It’s at best a feature with a long way to go; it’s at worst a promise that will never be kept.