Originally posted by Tilt
Seems to me that if you can, ............. do...........if you can't then play AH1 or ask for help now. (or both 
)
If you dont "input" now then come the day you'll just be one of the whinning masses 
I have played, around 12 hours on three days after I got my joystick working right (mostly my fault). My observations:
1) Too sensitive. If you had problems with black/red outs, tailspins and such with AH1 you will hate AH2. The planes/game play is worse with combat mode on than before with combat mode off. I never tail-spun a plane in AH1 but have crashed a lot in AH2
2) Fuel burn (arena setting) is way too high. Actually anything but the longer-range craft are worthless unless you are protecting your own base. Hence anything but P-51s, P-38s, 109s, etc. Don't bother with the Yaks as you will be out of fuel before you get there.
3) Higher stall speeds, lower overall and climbing speeds. Makes it easier to stall and harder to climb out of something, especially when your at a capped base. See tails spin comment above. If you like the tight, turning dog fighting style, AH2 isn't for you.
4) Sun glare is WAY to harsh. Yes, I know they are glass cockpits, but even in WW2 they understood the concept of eye shades and cockpit shading. As it is you might never see the oncomming aircraft even with shading your eyes with your hand. Of course you can always put the cockpit post in the sun and then remove all effects of it, so bye bye realism.
5) Gunnery has already been mentioned elsewhere. It is much harder to hit something. And gun damage seems much higher than "normal" so if you do get hit in one of the more fragile planes (like the 0s) it normally only takes one hit to disable you. And we aren't talking cannon hits, 50s are bad enough. I was running .25 K/D ratio in AH1 (I suck! ) but I don't think I have actually shot down anything in AH2. Most of my deaths have been with a single ping when I have been in the air (not counting dying repeatedly on the runway fighting from capped bases).
Good points are that it looks a lot better, though 64 Meg cards cannot take advantage of it. But even with the graphics turned down to keep the older cards smooth it actually looks like you are flying through a cloud and not a grey blob! Hence hiding in clouds is a little less effective. Joystick setup is nicer, actually showing you (graphically) the settings on your joystick and how it is responding to the game via graphing. The water looks good as you hit it :-) And a lot of other changes to the graphics that you can see even with the video modes turned down.
In short my opinion is that the game is much better looking, but the mechanics of it cause some definate changes that are NOT to the better as far as enjoyment. I realise that a lot of these are theoretically more accurate but decrease the pleasure of playing. And don't make a lot of sense in the accuracy department either. Yes, historically some planes were very hard to fly and none of them were easy, but us arm-chair pilots also cannot get the same feedback as actually flying (gravity, Gs, etc) either, so things that actual pilots got for warnings we have to do by intuition. If AH2 is the same after it leaves beta it will be put on the same shelf as all the other "realistic" flying games I have tried over the years.
