Beyond the first few hand-holding missions it’s perpetually thrilling, though I do wish it was a little more generous with checkpointing. Choosing the right plane, along with the right weapon and jet upgrades becomes paramount to success – which makes listening to the pre-mission briefing just as important. In each of the game’s twenty or so missions, you’ll pilot a plane equipped with a machine gun, missiles, and a selectable special weapon – like homing missiles, air-to-ground bombs and other tactical choices. That’s no different here, and to be honest not much has changed mechanically either. Though it veers more towards the arcade spirit of things, Ace Combat has always perfectly nailed the balance of feeling like an arcade game while presenting itself as a simulator.
Thankfully, the game more than makes up that by being so damned fun to play. It’s an occasionally endearing melodrama that’s very easy to ignore when pilots are blathering on about micro and macro politics from games past. Honestly, the story is a muddled (though not necessarily confusing) mess. It’s a needlessly overwrought tale, filled to the brim with awkward and cheesy dialogue, and while it coalesces into something compelling, it falls apart at the end. When Trigger is flagged for murder he may or may not have committed, he ends up in that same prison, and is forced to join a squadron of prisoners who must atone for their sins, engaging in near suicidal air combat missions. While you’ll be playing the game as a rookie pilot in the Osean forces who goes by the callsign Trigger, Ace Combat 7’s anime-inspired cutscenes focus on a young woman, who after reminiscing about her pilot grandfather, explains how she became an ace plane mechanic and rebuilt a plane, taking it to the skies in the middle of international combat. There are two stories that run parallel in Ace Combat 7. It ignores whatever continuity was set up in the last numbered game, returning to the conflict between the Osean Forces and the Kingdom of Erusea in the game’s fictional version of Earth, Strangereal.
#Ace combat 7 reviews full
I’d just finished one of Ace Combat 7’s dogfighting missions, that saw me pilot my plane through a thunderstorm while trying to take out an army of unmanned aircraft after clearing the area of its anti-aircraft defences.Īce Combat 7 is full of these sorts of spectacular, satisfying and empowering moments – making a fine return to form for a series that hasn’t had a numbered entry in more than eleven years.
It’s so awfully cliched and trite that I’m genuinely disappointed in myself – but there I was, pumping my fist in the air, impassionately whooping while Kenny Loggins’ “Highway to the Danger Zone” played inside my head.