Recent reviews by Etherlight

Thank you for the worst Battlefield to date, Dice. This is actually even worse than Hardline and BF4 Release version combined. Totally worth the $$$. Get bent.

As it is right now, it's a buggy mess with ugly textures from the 2000's and highly mediocre gameplay, which would be fine if this game had the decency to declare itself early access like Squad, but this is supposed to be a release.
Sorry, but no. Have some self respect, uphold some standard and deliver a certain amount of quality in due time. Back to Squad it is for now, which is way more polished, has more fluid gameplay, way better map design (hedges, anyone) and is in Early Access.

Thumbs down until this qualifies as a finished product.

P.S.: Actually just staight up decided to refund, I don't trust the dev after this and there are many great games to have for the price-tag. Shame, really.

We've all waited quite a long time for this patch, or to be fair, we have waited a very long time for 5.0, but got this instead in the meantime. While it certainly disappoints in terms of additional content (planes, gameplay additions of any kind), this was well known beforehand.
What was not known to me would be the severe downsides to this patch, which are in all honesty a downgrade from 4.13. And that list is quite long for my taste. Some of it absolutely boils down to personal opinion, like some of the fire/smoke effects, the (in all honesty objectively terrible) new gunsounds, the new ground textures which are fairly mixed and other visual "enhancements". Other things are just an observable fact, like the performance hit quite a few people experience, the warping of enemy planes in MP that I and a few others observed, the buggy UI and menus and the crashes people experience.

Now obviously it's not all bad, some textures definitely got better, some of the cockpits especially and a few parts of the groundwork. The remodeling of the flightmodels will have to be tested over time in-depth, before a judgement can be made, but the feeling for me and a few mates I asked didn't really change all that much. The meat of the changes might be more in the performance in certain situations, which time (and some testing) will show.

All in all I just feel like this patch removed even more polish from the game, and it couldn't really afford to lose it in the first place. Obviously this may be subject to change and I will definitely change this review if this comes to pass. But after checking this patch out, I really cannot help but wonder: Is this really the big bang that was supposed to bring Cliffs back into the game and relaunch it into a sellable product? The patch that we waited years for? Obviously I understand that 5.0 was supposed to be that, with all the new planes, the new theatre, the revamp of basically everything and all the good stuff...but right now that feels like it felt for years: a distant future. Especially now that this came along to replace it.

I just hope that Cliffs can survive long enough to actually see it come to fruition and that there is enough of a playerbase left to actually buy and play it at that time, because I do not see this patch bringing back all the people that left Cliffs by now.

Probably the worst map design in the history of mankind. 10/10, would get spawnraped again.