Sims are a curious beast. They’re perhaps the only form of gaming where the player willingly takes proven game elements like pace, learning curves, intuitive controls and storyline to the pawn shop and trades them for things that most of us play games to avoid. Things like rows of statistics, keyboard overlays, ten million dials and a strict budget.
To Namco’s credit, the Ace Combat series has steadily increased its simulation factor over the years, but still managed to keep its gameplay intact. Sure, there’s real world plane models (though somewhat less than Ace Combat 5) that will make you check your disk tray to make sure you didn’t accidentally put in a Top Gun DVD. It uses every single button on the controller; even the select button that most people forget exists. It has realistic physics and draw distance, so that most of the time you’re furiously chasing nothing but black specs with a green square around them instead of plugging hordes of perfectly speed matched foes from about twenty metres a la Afterburner. You have to manually extend your landing gear. You have to manage things like weapon loadouts. But make no mistake, you won’t even have to think about the controls after the first ten minutes.
As mentioned before, the programmers haven’t taken Ridge Racer-sized liberties with the laws of physics. Still, there’s those little arcadey touches everywhere. Most players will notice after a glance at their HUD that their fighter is equipped with nearly 200 heat seeking missiles, which in some missions still aren’t enough to finish without reloading.
Players will also notice that while it’s still possible to stall your jet, your virtual pilot will never exhibit any ill effects, no matter how many consecutive high G turns he pulls off at speeds that in the real world would vacuum pack your intestines into your ankles.
In other words, clearly the developers didn’t want too many pesky realities creeping into your fun. This leaves more time to pursue the main game mechanic, namely the Bruckheimer-like pursuit of larger and louder explosions. It goes like this: See a red blip on your radar. Follow that blip until you see his green square in your HUD. Keep the green square in your crosshairs until it turns red. Press the missile button about six times. Wait for your co pilot to tell you how awesome you are. Repeat.
In between these sessions of unadulterated hot death, Ace Combat introduces us to its “story” aspect. It’s important to note that, as in earlier instalments, Namco has made an interesting break from gaming tradition by making the story not about your own character. Instead, it’s the epic overdubbed journey of a pilot’s wife, from her picket fenced home in war torn Emmeria to the slate and granite of Estovakia, in search of her daughter. There’s even tears and slow motion pans of innocent children at play.
The surprising thing is that it’s arguably for the best, because any story that involved the pilots directly would no doubt become an onslaught of backslapping, patriotics and machismo. Instead, the story is like a counter balance to all the killing, giving your opponents a real sense of character and humanity that is only somewhat diluted by the fact you’ll kill almost a thousand of them in your first two hours of play.
As far as first impressions go, Ace Combat doesn’t quite hit all the right notes. Namco’s menu design and presentation once again looks like it could have been ripped from an SNES role player. The first few missions offer little in the way of variety, and most will be somewhat under whelmed by the sense of speed, which is unfortunately realistic.
But then, finally, it all comes together. The radar and objectives start to make sense. You get enough consecutive kills to earn an allied attack. You pull off a multiple kill using your special weapons. The weather effects and clouds start conveying that sense of speed. You realise that you’re getting excited.
You might even then decide to stray into a multiplayer game, only to be instantly shot down by the hordes of diehard Japanese fans who love the game so much they gave the 360 its biggest ever month in Japan. But you’ll persevere and finally manage to take a few down. By then, you’re converted.
Like many sims, Ace Combat requires a bit more commitment before it starts to give something back, but when it does you’ll be immersed in a deep, beautiful game with a dedicated online community and masses of replayability.
The good:
Amazing Graphics
Slick Controls
The bad
Dodgy story
Slow start
8/10
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