Jets are fun, everything else is terrible.
AS someone who's never played an Ace Combat game before the changes to the series are lost on me. From my perspective, as a newcomer, the air combat is a lot of intense fun and the DFM system (which i hear is new to the series) is decent. Outside of that the helicopter sequences, whether piloting or as a door gunner, are boring by comparison to the traditional game. If you're looking for an arcade based helicopter game check out Apache: Air Assault and door gunning was compelling in Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter but a tedious chore here.
This is an arcade flight combat game and it does a decent job of emulating an air combat focused action film but this comes at a cost as some of the scripting sequences in the game are just flat out bad design. Two point in particular where i had to look up a game FAQ only to find the reason i was failing is because i wasn't activating the script condition that wasn't communicated to me in the game. Outside of that, here and there, you can't tell if you're failing because of lack of skill or if there's a sequence condition you're missing which leads to a great deal of frustration.
After completing the game, i'm more interested in checking out the Ace Combat games of the past rather than see this series continued in this modern iterative form.
