This game is excellent, and is far higher quality than I was expecting from something with an Alpha label. The visuals are fantastic, dynamic weather effects are great, and most importantly the gameplay itself feels really solid. Performance is also pretty good, running on maxed settings and usually hanging around 80 FPS. While recording it occasionally drops to 60, but never below that. (Specs below).
Difficulty is also spot on for the most part. The enemy AI is very well done IMO and dogfights on Hard difficulty are exciting and fun. Only really minor thing I would comment on is the tendency of one or two jets from a squadron leaving their group to chase you if you happen to pass a tiny bit too close while the rest continue to ignore you. It certainly doesn't hurt the gameplay at all, but I think immersion-wise it would be a plus if enemy formations worked with a tiny bit more cohesion (ex: if one plane in a formation detects you, all planes in that formation attack instead of just that one). Like I said though, that's REALLY minor and doesn't really count as a negative for me, just a thought I had.
The one outlier for difficulty for me is the two 'special' fighters at the end of Clear Skies. Facing one alone is pretty easy, even on Hard difficulty, but both at once is a pretty sharp spike in difficulty in comparison because of how aggressively they spam missiles. Even on Normal difficulty I've had times where a single wrong turn when trying to evade them has led to 3 or 4 missiles hitting me at once. They're definitely not unbeatable and I can regularly beat them in 2v1s now, but on my first couple of playthroughs it was like running into a brick wall compared to the rest of the enemies.
But, that's the only gripe I have with this game so far, aside from one time I played where the camera didn't centre properly at the end of a Chainlink mission. The rest of it is great, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what you do with it in the future.
Specs:
Win 10 64-bit
Intel i5-6600K quad core @ 3.5GHz
16GB RAM
GTX 1080 w/ 8GB dedicated memory