Changing paces
Originally published at Lunar Shards. You can comment here or there.
So I ran through Ace Combat: Assault Horizon with in 2 days of playing it. Now that was a total of some 20 hours or so of intense gameplay. Yet as a fan of the series this really did hit me with a huge change of pace from the style of play. I’ve played Ace Combat 3 through 6 as well as all the PSP games and each have that ace combat distinctive feel to it but each one felt like they were just another rehash of the previous featuring flying fortresses and frustrating tunnel missions. So when I went into Assault Horizon I was expecting much of the same except in the real world setting much like Ace Combat: Joint Assault. My god was I wrong.
Assault Horizon changes the way Ace Combat feels fundamentally and its very apparent in the tutorial mission which starts you off battling over Miami, FL. The game has a much more cinematic feel to it especially when you enter the dog fighting system where the game essentially enters a railshooter mode which you still control your aim as well as speed to try to stick to the enemy’s tail. Thrilling just about says it all especially when you go blazing just a few hundred feet off the deck and weaving through buildings. Funny enough there is one reference for flying through a tunnel like setting but that’s in a very specific mission and mostly played for laughs. This game is dangerous genre savvy :O
The system is very satisfying when you get the kill shot or force the enemy to crash which happens in a somewhat scripted fashion but damn nice. That being said the same system applies when they get on your tail. It took me some time to figure out how to defend against it. You have to slam on your breaks but also be careful that you don’t stall. Once you get to the right speed, you have to level out and slam on the same buttons to activate the dog fighting mode and you can slip behind the enemy and reverse your positions. I found myself actually letting the enemy on my tail just to do this. The system itself is similar to one Project Aces used for Skycrawlers which is a Wii game similar to Ace Combat. If you tail an enemy long enough you can trigger an maneuver ability which re-positions you perfectly on the tail of your enemy to gun them down since that’s all you have in the game. I swear that game forced me into the longest dog fight I remember of any game I’ve played so far though this one came pretty damn close.
The game also features a other type of missions including several Apache missions which are fun but frustrating as sometimes you get caught up in the terrain of buildings. It takes some getting use to but can be very rewarding to pop in and out of cover pelting the enemy. There are several gunner missions from the side of a blackhawk which can be kind of crazy considering how much destruction your raining down on the environment. There is only one AC-130 mission which was meh but is kind of neat, the ending sequence for that was a bitch though since there was too much movement to make a proper with anything unless it was a huge. Finally the bombing mission. The bombing mission as well as some normal missions use a similar system to the dog fighting system which lines you up on your path. You still have control of your plane for the most part but it restricts your movements to focus on the bombing/gunning portion. This is especially satisfying when your using the A-10 considering it was designed for this. I rarely got it to work right in other games but this fits it just right.
Although I own an Ace Edge for the Xbox 360, I didn’t use it for this game due to the face they don’t work right for the other sections such as the Apache missions or the gunner missions but that’s fine. The 360 controller was enough for me to enjoy it. Even though it doesn’t use the Ace Edge, it’s still a very damn good set of controls. The default control sets you to optimum which makes it easier to deal wit the dog fighting system.
Overall Assault Horizon is a very fun game yet very different from the rest of the Ace Combat series. As stated by it’s producer, he had to destroy the series in order to create something new. I’m impressed with what they’ve done. Would I recommend this game to another Ace Combat fan? Sure.