While there are quite a few game series that have had more than six titles, it's reasonably rare that you find a game with the '6' in the name. I wonder slightly whether that's because the number scares off people that haven't bought any of the previous five games. I’m one of the few that has never played a previous Ace Combat game though, so this is a fresh view of the series.
In the single player campaign you play as a nameless air force fighter pilot in the fictional country of Gracemaria. At the beginning of the game you and the rest of the Gracemarian military are driven out to a corner of the country by a surprise attack from the neighbouring country of Estovakia. The rest of the campaign sees you taking back your country across a number of missions. Between the missions you also get a nice story of how one Gracemarian family is being affected, as well as a viewpoint of an Estovakian officer on the ground to show you that war isn't all kicking arse, chewing gum and getting laid (just in case you weren't aware).
Before each mission starts you get a mission brief, and then you get to pick the aeroplanes and weapons that both you and your overly needy wingmen will be using for that mission. There's an interesting mix of real life and imaginary equipment on offer, with the various options becoming available as you progress through the game. After that you dive into the mission and the first thing you'll notice is that Ace Combat looks great. It's literally photo-realistic a lot of the time, but then I'd kind of hope it to be with the only things to see being blue sky and the ground viewed from a couple of thousand feet away most of the time. When you get close to the ground things don't look so great, but then you're going fast enough it shouldn't matter. The game also feels very nice – the flight model is semi-realistic, to stop you doing anything too outrageous, but loose enough to make even a first timer feel like an ace in the sky. Each aeroplane has different handling characteristics too, so you get a constantly changing flight experience through the campaign.
Whilst it all looks and feels good, I'm not so sure about the action in the game. You choose your target, get close in and then fire missiles at it, then turn back and do the same to the next target. If you pick certain weapon load-outs you can drop a range of different bombs on ground/sea targets instead, and air targets can require a little bit of manoeuvring to get a good lock-on, but it all seems a little too simple. When you're fired upon you have to watch the incoming missile on the radar and time your evasive manoeuvres correctly. It should be exciting, but in the first four or five missions you're not really in any danger of being shot down, and later on when you are the constant warning alarms and the consequent need to pull tight turns to evade missiles rapidly gets annoying. The game has supposedly improved hugely over previous iterations by giving you a greater strategic control on the battlefield – you get to direct some of your forces, and you also have to carefully choose what objective you should attack next to help the allied forces. I'm sure it’ll please long time Ace Combat fans, but it's the kind of thing that's expected from games these days.
Like many things, the game improves immeasurably with friends, and Ace Combat benefits from online support. You can either do missions online co-op with three friends or get into 16 player dogfighting battles. I don't know about the longevity of online play though – it's fun, but I'm not sure if the depth is there to keep you playing for weeks on end.
All in all, Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation is a solid game, but it's perhaps not as exciting as I would have liked. I don't think everyone will feel that way though, and from that point of view I think it's well worth giving it a try. At the very least you can look at it and drool for a bit.
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