On its initial release i wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole. Iron cross edition is significantly better but i still haven't bought it. For the record, i have tried the demo on three separate occasions several months apart, so that i could get an accurate feel of the progress it's making. Since the demo is actually an unregistered copy of the full game only with limited playability, the latest patches are applied to it and you can judge what has changed. One thing that's missing is the ability to deny installation of a patch or roll back to a previous version in case a new update breaks more than it fixes, but generally nothing has been terribly broken thus far and the updates on important issues that get discovered are being worked on constantly.
If there's another version down the line with true offline gameplay (not everybody's internet is that reliable, intermittent disconnects are a minor nuisance when browsing forums but a serious hindrance when the game tries to upload the mission stats/download the next mission in the campaign and you're stuck with pressing "retry" for half an hour) and properly fleshed out campaigns i would seriously consider it.
It's not the pay-per-plane scheme they are using that's putting me off (after all, 5.5 Euros a piece is not a terrible price), but the fact that this business model makes the devs focus on flyables exclusively.
I would prefer less flyables and more AI aircraft so that the computer doesn't, for example, spawn late war Sopwith Snipes against my early war Albatros D.II because it lacks the aircraft types to do a proper, historically accurate representation.
Also, this model greatly diversifies everyone's available planeset, so each server must make sure to run missions that use at least one of the stock aircraft per side that are provided with the base install package and these are only late war aircraft.
If the early war theaters open up down the line, there would be a need to have a few of the respective aircraft types as freeware add-ons, otherwise people would find themselves having to sit out an entire mission every now and then due to a lack of appropriate flyables on their accounts to fly it.
In the end, the decision depends on how you want to fly it.
As a purely online pass time i'd say it would be pretty solid at this stage. If what you mostly care about is flying online and you find a few servers that cater to your preferred gameplay, the always online DRM and the lack of an in-depth single player campaign won't bother you at all and this will let the rest of its advantages shine on their own merit: graphics, sounds, flight model physics, versatile mission builder and its very true to life sense of altitude and speed. I would include the damage model too but some things appear a bit artificial and dodgy sometimes in regards to it, nothing that the devs aren't made aware of or are unable to fix however.
Spend an extra 20-30 Euros on a few add-on flyables for some variety and you would be good to go.
If you mostly care about flying in-depth single player scenarios, then you would be better of waiting a few more months until they flesh it out a bit more in this department.
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