18 Oct, 2011
Name: Ace Combat Assault Horizon
Platform: Xbox 360, PS3 (reviewed on Xbox 360)
Developer: Project Aces
Publisher: Namco Bandai Games of America
Tagline: Call of Duty in the air, but with even more repetition
Family Friendly: This is a tough call. The game is rated T, but you do get blood spatter on your windshield when you shoot down an airplane and there is some mild language, but it is probably safe for 12 and up.
When Ace Combat Assault Horizon showed up in my mailbox, I have to admit that I was excited and perplexed at the same time. I had never played an Ace Combat game, but I do love playing games that use flight, regardless of whether it is a true simulation or an arcade shooter. After several hours of playing Ace Combat Assault Horizon, I found myself doing something that I have never been prone to do, which is launch a controller into the couch. There may be a good game to be found in this latest installment of Ace Combat, but all I found was bad controls, repetitive action and frustration at every turn.
You can tell that Call of Duty was the influence behind this Ace Combat title. Developer Project Aces definitely went for realism with this title, as they have battles taking place in real life locations, including Moscow, Miami, Dubai and more, with several locals ready for release via DLC. There is also a surprising about of detail in each of these locations, as the areas were generated from real world geographical detail, so you can find real world landmarks in each location. Even the story plays out like a Call of Duty game, with lots of action sequences, and of course a shocking turn of events that are completely telegraphed to the player and seem ripped out of a standard Call of Duty sequence.
When Ace Combat Assault Horizon gets you into a plane, things start off well enough, as the controls are nice and responsive with a gamepad. The detail on the ground does not go to waste, and when you fly low to the deck, you do appreciate the amount of detail that went into creating the landscapes you are flying through. And that detail is not for show, as I found myself working my plane near ground level and even at points, flying between high rise buildings. The flight model is arcade like, but the exhilaration of flying through is something that has not been captured in any games I have played recently.
As you initiate combat from a plane, the combat starts off fresh enough, with two combat modes available when in a standard jet. Depending on the mission, you will find yourself in DFM (Dog Fighting Mode) and ASM (Air Strike Mode). Dog fighting mode has you pressing a LB and RB to get a close in view of you in pursuit of an enemy plane. The idea is to keep you in close to the action, keeping the enemy lined up in your sights as you lay down a combination of guns and missiles to take out the enemy. Air Strike Mode has you viewing the action from the underside of a plane as you approach a ground target on a pre-determined approach vector to hit ground targets. Each of these modes work well enough, and the missions change up enough to keep the missions somewhat fresh at the start, but after several of these missions, things start to drag as the feeling of repetition kicks in. I was able to get past the stagnant gameplay in the plane missions, but things went horribly wrong when I had to take on the new helicopter missions.
Yes, Ace Combat Assault Horizon offers up helicopter missions, which are a first for the series upon my research into previous titles. Missions vary in the helicopter between being a support gunner on a heavy duty transport helicopter and straight up attack and support with an AH-64 Apache. It sounds fun enough, until you have to control the Apache helicopter. The sad fact is that the helicopters play like someone using a first person shooting title, and that does not translate at all for these helicopter missions. Too often you find yourself fighting the controls, and frustration easily kicked in after one mission. It does not help that the helicopter missions drag on for far too long. The first Apache mission seemed to drag on for at least 20 minutes and it went on far longer than that, as I constantly died while fighting the controls. I found myself always running out of missiles and trying to use guns to take down a couple of enemy helicopters with guns is an exercise in futility. It was during this first Apache mission that I just about destroyed a controller.
I appreciate the decision to try something new with a game like Ace Combat, as you don’t want to be accused of doing the same thing over and over with the next release, but if you are going to add something new, you have to make it fun, and the helicopter missions are flat out boring in the gunner mode and beyond all normal frustration in the Apaches. If I could have just stuck to the jet missions, I would have been happy, but you have to play the helicopter missions, it just killed any momentum I had with the game.
I could take all of this in stride if there was a compelling narrative to be had, but even here, I never found anything keeping me hooked into the action. You have a team, things happen, good guys become bad, and so on, and there is never a moment where you care, because you have seen this story many times before. If you played Modern Warfare 2, you have seen the idea of what is happening here in Ace Combat Air Assault. Adding real places grounds the story a bit more, but there is never a point where you identify with anyone in the story and you don’t really care if they succeed as you just want the game to end at some point.
Maybe I am the wrong audience for Ace Combat Assault Horizon, but I would like to thing that I am the prime audience. I love story driven air combat games, like the Wing Commander series, but I just had no interest in knowing anything after the third or fourth mission in the game. Ace Combat Assault Horizon just becomes an unoriginal mess that leaves you wanting so much more. The one thing this game did prompt me to do is to grab on to one of the previous titles in the series, as I am hoping I can find the fun there that I was supposed to find here. Die-hard fans should probably enjoy but the rest of the console crowd can probably move on to more pressing affairs this fall.
The Good:
- Plane Flight Mechanics Are Good
- High resolution environments using real world places
The Bad:
- Cliched Story
- Terrible Helicopter Missions and Controls
- Becomes very repetitive
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