Let’s Fly Around And Shoot Things
Okay, I got a few gripes with Ace Combat: Assault Horizon.
1. One of the early missions is THAT MISSION. You know the one: your jackass wingman wanders off on his own and you have to save his life or else the mission automatically fails for some reason, because we all know that a single fighter getting shot down will lose a war. My instant reaction to a mission like that is to want to shoot down said wingman myself. If he’s going to insist on taking the future of my game in his hands then the hell with that guy, I don’t want to fly with him.
2. There’s a mission where you have to shoot down bombers which (we fear!) may contain the Enemy’s New Superweapon (tm) before they reach the city. You shoot them down. The mission ends. Then you find out that there weren’t any superweapons on the bombers. But guess what? If one of the bombers got through, the mission fails anyway for some reason.
3. The city you’re defending in that mission is Dubai. Screw Dubai, that place sucks. Let it burn.
4. And now the plot is suddenly about a Russian civil war? Again? Oh my god how many times are we going to go through this? That aside, if they were going to go for the real-world setting they could at least go over the top with it, like H.A.W.X. 1 did, instead of using Bog-Standard Military Thriller Plot #679. I’ll be a happy man if I never fly over Russia again, frankly.
5. So heavily scripted, you don’t have a chance to recover from failures and you must complete every task in precisely the way the designers want. I seem to recall that in AC6, for example, you could flunk an operation or two and still complete a mission. And in AC4 you pretty much had complete control over how you approached a battlefield full of targets. (And yeah, AC5 was more on the scripted side, but at least the script was awesome and beautiful so I’ll give it a pass.)
6. The close-combat thingie is… almost good. It can be quite exciting and tense. But again, the scripting rears its ugly head. The game wants you to have this thrilling chase through skyscrapers and valleys, so when you enter close combat you get wrenched around onto the pre-scripted track. And if you kill the enemy and come out at the wrong time, you may return to full control with your nose pointed straight at the ground at top speed. As a side note, because of the insistence on close combat all of the timed situations (destroy the bomber or cruise missile before it reaches the target) are ridiculously frenetic — the bad guys are practically in your face the moment the objective appears and you barely have seconds to deal with the problem.
7. A big variety of different vehicles means none of them are polished. The air combat is decent, though the controls are rough. The rail-shooty bits in the helicopter are okay. Flying the helicopter is kind of okay. The AC-130 is terrible. Overall, they’re clearly going for the Modern Warfare style jump from cinematic event to cinematic event, but that’s at the cost of just doing one thing well. And even if you want to be story-focused all this jumping around is definitely at the cost of getting to know a small crew very well and make the player care about them, like in AC5.
8. Since when does the American military instantly hop to at the orders of foreign generals? Oh, right, that’s actually how things work nowadays. Still, if we must do the real-world thriller thing throw us bitter nationalists a bone, huh?
9. The graphics are so HDR and blown-out and surrealistically bright that it’s very hard to make out your targets in all the glare.
10. I miss Strangereal. :( I miss the romance and melodrama and ridiculously impractical superweapons. I’ll bet this game doesn’t even end with flying down a miles-long tunnel in your jet plane to save the world!
So yeah, I dunno. It’s kind of feeling like one of those games where the moment I hit anything even mildly frustrating I’ll just give up, because there’s nothing making me want to keep playing. I had my issues with AC6, but at least so far I’ll take it over Assault Horizon any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
