Ace Combat Assault Horizon

The Ace Combat series and I go way back. I may have come a bit late in game, but Shattered Skies just blew me away when you fly threw that missile silo. Definitely on my all time favorite PlayStation 2 games. Ever since then I have been on the band wagon eating up every Ace Combat that came out since. So imagine my disappointment when they skipped over the PS3 in favor of the Xbox with their Ace Combat 6. But that is all ancient history and we PS3 owners finally get a proper Ace Combat game. However, this is also the Ace Combat where the development team saw fit to change their formula and try a fresh new take on it. So does it come off as a positive change or should they just given us fans of the series more of the same?

Lets cut right to the skinny shall we. The biggest change that was made is this new dog-fighting mode. Basically if you have played Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. it is very similar to their lock on mode. Your jet locks on to your enemy and that frees up some of your maneuvering and you just need to focus on keeping him in your target area to fire “high accuracy missiles” to tear him apart. The reason behind this change is that the development team wanted bigger and more over-the-top action. And that is all fine and good, but some of us like the game the way it was before. I for one am not a fan of this new combat system. I liked the dog fighting the way it was before. But the way the game is set up now, if you aren’t using DFM you are being torn apart. So take this change, and add to it, helicopters (that’s right, for the first time you get to fly helicopters) and you have the major changes in this iteration. The helicopters? Yea those suck. Slow and lumbering, if I wanted to fly helicopters I would have gotten that new Apache game that came out a bit ago.

I don’t want to paint a grim picture though, there are some parts of Assault Horizon that are actually pretty good. They went out and spent some money on an honest to goodness military author to get the story for this game. Though I personally liked the anime style stories of the previous games, this one has its strong points. Provided you can get through the missions that is. They are hard as hell most of the time. But also have great moments of action and intense situations. If you can get past the much less interesting helicopter missions and the DFM heavy rest, you will find an interesting story that is worth seeing if you are a fan of that type of story. Like I said, I thought it wasn’t bad.

So are these changes good for the franchise or are they just screwing us fans? Well I suppose I can understand why they did it. Really where are these arcade flight style games at now-a-days? Who plays them? Just weird people like me and I doubt this last Ace Combat sold any better than the ones before it, aside from the fact that it was released on more than one platform. Basically, I don’t like the way the game turned out. I like how it was before. I don’t like DRM and I sure as hell don’t want to fly choppers. At the same time though, there are probably even less people like me who prefer the way things used to be. Video games have changed since then and it is up to developers to change with them so I can’t fault them for trying. I would recommend fans of H.A.W.X. to try this one out because it is very similar, but fans of Ace Combat, well keep waiting I suppose.