It's fun. It looks good, it has a "believable" flight model. The gunnery is pretty good, but the planes kind of "slide" around on each axis whenever you move the joystick so this makes long distance shooting more difficult, but not neccesarily hard.
The way you can taxi around and stuff is pretty cool, by that I mean it seems modelled fairly well, but there is no differential braking.
In the end, it's no AH. It compliments it well, whenever you just wanna kill some AI planes and get a little practice, the quick mission builder it has is very handy.
It'll be getting an update soon, there's already 2 out... but you only need one. The last update added the 190A5 and a bunch of ordnance for those 2 planes. The next update is adding a Polish PZL 11c and a Russian experimental rocket(?) fighter- the Bi-1.
There's also many more planes being worked on, and most of them currently in the game are rumored to be made flyable at some point down the road.
It's definitely not a waste of money, and since all add-ons (planes, cockpits- some are made by 3rd party people) have to pass through QA at Maddox/1C then it's pretty much guaranteed all 3rd party aircraft will be good.
I'd recommend you get it for the price Best Buy is selling it, I bought it the first day it came out at EB for over 50$... It's definitely the highest quality boxed game I've bought in a long while.
-SW
