Some really early first impressions from my end!
-Is it WOFF in WWII? Yeah, pretty much - that is, it'll seem familiar to anybody who'd played that. Controls, menus, views, the whole lot of the presentation is basically unchanged. Not a bad thing, if you like WOFF.
-The terrain is looking good! I was glad to see that it's not a copy-paste of the the existing WWI-era map of England from WOFF. It looks like WWII England. London seems to have sprawled out and become a bit denser in most places. Buildings in many places look a good bit different. Trees are denser and more varied. The landscape overall is not quite as sharp and vibrant as say IL-2 CloD's England terrain, but makes up for it with some lovingly-crafted details you'd expect like livestock and the lot. Plenty of landmarks, and a ton of airfields - I've only poked around a little, but it seems like 10, 11 and 12 Group fields are basically all present and accounted for. Object counts and draw distances have definitely increased since WOFF.
-Water looks great, clouds look great, some new effects here and there.
-Cockpits are very good. Again, not better than comparable titles, but plenty good enough on the eye. No clickable switches, but the instruments are sharp and all seem to work as expected. Textures are a little flat in places, but the lighting and shadowing of the cockpit is smooth and gives you a good feeling of depth.
-Aircraft models are good, though the poly counts and texture resolutions aren't going to wow anyone - showing the base engine's age a bit here. Variety of skins is really limited right now.
-Flyable aircraft... well, what you see is what you get! For now it's Hurri Mk.I and Bf 109E-4, and that's all for the moment. Neither comes with a lot of paint schemes out of the box.
-Lack of documentation or training on the aircraft right now is a bit disappointing. Both of the main planes have some really important quirks, and unless you already know them from elsewhere, you might feel a little lost at first!
-Flight models seem good on first try, as far as I can gather. The Hurricane seems at a fair bit of handicap against the 109 - feels like a weighty aircraft, but rugged. Stalls and spins are harsh, but compared to most of WOFF's WWI aircraft are much easier to recover from.
-The AI's survival instincts from WOFF that I so much enjoy are definitely intact. If they don't like what they're seeing, they're off. Hooray! And on initial dogfighting, the Bf 109s were definitely doing booming and zooming all the way, and not getting tangled up in knife fights. If you fly RAF, I can already tell you'll be in for a tough time if you choose to take on fighters. (edit: after trying a couple of campaign missions - confirmed!!)
-Game generally runs good and stable, as you'd expect it - though does retain some of the CFS3/WOFF quirks, such as its finickiness about alt-tabbing. Frame rates are a little lower than I'm used to in WOFF, but proportionally to the increase in detail/draw distances - which means you can get it back up by lowering settings a little.
-The team continues evolving the engine bit by bit as in WOFF - as I mentioned, there's some noticeable (but not huge) improvements in details. But it's also a work in progress - for example, there's some intriguing placeholders in the UI, like a DX11 render option, which for the moment is greyed out.
-The new flak definitely made me sit up and go wow! Impressive job. I think the smoke sprites themselves could be a little larger and more uneven, but the animations, sound, and "oomph" to flak is just fantastic overall. I am going to be really excited to see the flak really go to work when WOTR moves over to strategic bombing of the continent....
-Damage effects in flight are pretty reasonable - bullet holes, parts getting shot off and all. I turned the AI gun accuracy to low, particularly for the tail gunners - they still seem to be pretty good shots, but not excessively so. Gunfire seems generally more immediately deadly to the aircraft (if not the pilot).
-There's a pretty hilarious glitch (hopefully to be fixed soon!) with bailing out - your pilot will jump and clear the aircraft just fine, parachute deployed... then proceed to drop to the ground faster than your aircraft in a fatal nosedive! It looks silly, though seems to have no bearing on the result. Aircraft also do some funny things after crashing, especially into the water - e.g. a plane that nosedived into the Channel will leave a very intact-looking fuselage standing on its nose right in the water.
-Sound is very good on first impression. Still getting used to it - not sure what I think of the engine sounds yet - but there's a lot of neat ambient sound and a lot of 'oomph' to things in general.
-Radio comms are rudimentary, but I'm intrigued by some of what I see. Playing as RAF, you do indeed get vectors from ground control - and the information you get from them isn't always precise. Sometimes you get pretty vague directions and intel.
-Don't have a good sense of the campaign yet but, again, seems to be functionally identical to WOFF - and that's a good thing in my book. Can't tell you how well it captures the real actions of that period yet, but looks promising. The couple of campaign missions I flew, in July over water as RAF, seemed pretty busy. Both were scrambles to contacts made by RDF stations, if the briefings are to be believed. The Germans were active and quickly concentrated in one area (though the formations weren't too dense), and their fighters were never too far away from their bombers. I usually spotted the fighters first, and although I'm not too positive on that - at least over the channel/Thames estuary, I was only catching bombers during egress. I was mostly encountering them in multiple groups of 6-8 at altitudes over 12-15,000 - they passed through the same areas in a relatively brief space of time and scooted out. I usually seemed to be able to get at the bombers - but only very briefly before the 109s were all over me. It seemed like they were pretty content to just drive me down - I could lose them pretty easily, but only at the cost of a few thousand feet in altitude (along with any chance of catching up to the same bomber formation again). But if I was stubborn and stuck it out, they made mincemeat out of me pretty quickly - once they start firing, you pretty much have to pull something high-G or you'll get hit hard.
So... not bad so far!