Hi, new poster here and recreational pilot iRL.
I have a Saitek flight wheel and rudder pedals, as well as a throttle control... the controls feel like I'm in molasses. There's a noticeable delay between the time I move the stick and the time the ailerons actually turn. Turning smoothness and speed seems to be unaffected by whether or not I apply rudder, only elevator and tight turns seem to actually affect it.
Mouse controls are terrible too, since with the keyboard, you can't actually control the rudder save for to move your mouse slightly to the left or right. The mouse pointer also floats back to the center of the targeting reticle, so you have to keep moving your mouse repeatedly to keep turning.
I tried with a gamepad, which makes the game slightly better, but the controls are jerky, and the plane keeps jerking, like I'm being caught in a crosswind. As near as I can tell, this game actually takes place in a completely windless environment, so that's odd.
Throttle appears to only have "super boost" and "idle" options with no speeds in between, so it's difficult to control altitude or shake people with speed maneuvers -- or at the very least, it is not working on my controllers.
As a side note unrelated to this topic, the planes are apparently made out of adamantium, since they take hundreds of hits to down, and some of those old Tier I era biplanes would (in real life) crash if you hit them with so much as a dirty look.
I like the historical aspects of the game, but it's super arcadey right now. I regularly see people at angles that should have them dropping out of the sky like rocks, and yet the game just lets them do it. It looks great, the music is great, the collection of aircraft is great, but the flight model and control scheme definitely needs modification to get it up to flight simulator standards.
Edited by SpiritualLiege, 21 October 2012 - 01:54 AM.