JASF: Jane's Advanced Strike Fighters

Well since Ace Combat: Assault Horizon didn’t do it for me, I picked up Jane’s Advanced Strike Fighters on a whim to see if that was worth the few dollars I paid for it. Besides, ATF Gold was one of my earliest and favorite PC games that I ever played so Jane still knows how to make ‘em right? Well not so much. After playing just one mission, I was already beginning to miss that good old crazy Ace Combat action. Even if it was drastically changed. But I will save that for the dislike paragraph, for now I will close this out by saying, J.A.S.F is probably not the game you want, unfortunately.

So just what is wrong with Jane’s Advanced Strike Fighters? Well how much time do you have? But seriously, J.A.S.F doesn’t look too different from ATF Gold. The planes look nice, sure, but not as good as Ace Combat and everything else looks like crap. On top of that, all of the planes feel slow. They put in this little afterburner boost effect that blurs all of your surroundings, but guess what? Still feels like you are moving slowly. So that is probably the biggest issue, because the one thing you need to get right in this type of game is that sense of speed.

“Well that’s not so bad,” you might be saying. There’s more. They give you a stock number of missiles with a cool down timer to spawn more. Usually you have what seems like an unlimited number of missiles, but sometimes you just run out. That forces you to shoot things down the hard way, with your cannon. And that is no fun. To go along with the “unlimited” number of missiles, every mission aside from the first seems to have unlimited number of enemies. That’s right, while you are trying to focus on taking out your primary objective you will constantly be bombarded with wave after wave of enemy jets. You can shoot them down, but you are wasting your time, because until the primary objective is destroyed, they will just keep coming. The HUD may start out green, but I only ever remember it being red from incoming missiles.

I know what you are thinking. I haven’t said anything nice about the game. Okay, fair enough. This is a perfectly comparable arcade style jet game. There are a good number of missions and a great number of jets to choose from. If you can look past the perfectly atrocious voice acting and script dialogue, the story all be it bland is acceptable. I tell you what though, I thought Star Ocean: The Last Hope had awful voice acting, this one might take the cake. But I don’t want to turn this into a negative paragraph as well so I will close with this. Jane’s Advance Strike Fighters is a game that you should only settle for if you can’t find anything else and you need your jet fix. It may not even satisfy that. But it is a game with jets and sometimes you shoot enemies and blow them up. So if that sounds like it is up your alley, well then I suppose you can waste your money on this one.