Okay. Good news first.
- I like the campaign's presentation. The "civil war" plot is one that pops up in fan campaigns too often for my liking, but Reunion handles it pretty well. The mission briefings, while sparse (Scroll of Antankharzim has spoiled me with its luxurious briefing animations), are well done and have no obvious problems. A lot of campaigns have difficulties with this and use a kind of tone that isn't appropriate to the FS military sci-fi setting ("Anyways, pilot, we don't really expect you to run into any trouble in this mission, so it should be a walk in the park for you, amirite?"), and Reunion avoids that. It takes itself seriously, which is good.
- So many mods gives the campaign a sense of variety, especially if (like me) you haven't played a lot of campaigns in general or have been absent from the community scene for a while, so everything seems new. The custom comm animations are a nice touch.
- I haven't finished the campaign yet, but what I've seen of the story has kept me engaged. The wingmen in Alpha have a good group dynamic without being over-the-top. (However, I wouldn't go so far as to keep censoring profanity with convenient bursts of static; it seems childish.)
The bad news:
- In general, the campaign is too difficult. This is due to a combination of several factors, but the most significant is probably the highly aggressive "Blue Planet" AI. I started the campaign on medium (my default setting) and had to scale back to Easy because I kept getting killed before I could make any progress. Now--playing on Easy--I'm limping back to base with my ship shot full of holes.
- Corollary to the above: wingmen simply aren't as capable as the enemy AI. They almost seem like they're moving in slow motion and don't turn or fire as quickly as enemy ships. So far, I've ended every mission of the campaign with all of my extra wingmen shot down; the only reason that Alpha wing don't get killed too is because they all have Plot Armor and can't be destroyed.
- Weapons consistently feel underpowered, either because they're not doing enough damage, because the AI is using advanced shield management, or both. The Claymore positions itself as a refined version of the Keyser, but it's nothing of the kind; given its high power drain, it just doesn't do enough damage in exchange. I regularly run out of gun power hammering on enemy ships; you shouldn't have to keep a fighter under sustained, accurate fire for ten seconds or longer before it explodes. The tech room also has no weapons entries, so you can't look up any information on your new guns and missiles.
- The enemy Terran ships are all extremely fast and highly maneuverable, which greatly lessens the effectiveness of your secondary weapons. As a result, your stock FS2 missiles are essentially useless. There have been multiple occasions where I've had half a dozen wingmen trying to shoot down a single enemy fighter; they aren't accurate enough with their guns to hit it, and all of their missiles--and mine--explode harmlessly behind it. In addition, owing to the Macross-style design ethos of all the Terran fighters, they have sleeker designs and more narrow target profiles than the stock FS ships, which makes them harder to hit in general. More than once, I've been tailing a fighter that I've been unable to hit because my gun mounts are wider than the fighter is.
- The music is different, but the quality is uneven. I like the atmospheric choral pieces; the DOOM-style heavy metal, not so much. After replaying a difficult mission for the third or fourth time, I got tired of having that blaring in my ears.
When I resume the campaign, I'm going to set the difficulty to Very Easy and keep it there, because frankly, I need the edge.
EDIT: I forgot to mention that, for whatever reason, it takes support ships a godawful long time to dock with the new fighters. I would guess that the new ship models have docking points in out-of-the-way places, and support is having trouble finding them.
