I’ve played perhaps an hour’s worth of flight-sims in my entire life and was pulling off daring low-altitude strafing runs by the third or fourth mission. Ace Combat 7 offers two control schemes, one of which is mildly simulationist while the other lets you mostly forget about annoying things like physics and throw your aircraft around as if it was held by a toddler. Even in the more pedestrian missions, the game is still fun thanks to its slick and exhilarating combat. It’s structured in such a way that you’re always keen to see what the game will throw at you next. There are missions that takes place during dust storms and thunderstorms, and others where you need to fly under the radar or below the clouds to remain undetected by enemy artillery. Highlights include a daring rescue of the Osean President from a Space Elevator and an assault on a giant plane called the Arsenal Bird which acts an airborne carrier for hundreds of jet-sized drones. Rather than frame itself in a realistic setting, Ace Combat 7 proposes a near-future scenario, which gives it license to be far more creative with mission parameters. Obviously, this is utterly daft, but it's precisely such absurd scenarios that make Ace Combat 7’s campaign such fun to play. This is exactly like regular prison except for the fact that you still get to Fly a Cool Plane and Blow Stuff Up before returning to prison to serve your sentence like any convict equipped with an incredibly fast plane absolutely would do. Early on in the story, you are convicted of what I shall simply describe as A Big Crime, and you are sent to – and I am not kidding – Pilot Prison. The 20-mission campaign sees you playing as Trigger, a hotshot pilot for the Army of Osea, which is at war with the neighbouring country Erusea. You could remove every cutscene that doesn’t concern itself with mission planning, and you’d probably not notice.Īll the story you need features in the missions themselves and the mission prep. Worse, most of this centres around a character who barely even features in the game itself. ![]() The cutscenes are so interminable that sometimes it feels more like you’re watching a film that features cut-missions. ![]() That area is (and I’m sure this will shock you) storytelling! The main problem is there is so much of it. It says a lot about Ace Combat 7 that the one area where it doesn’t focus on Flying a Cool Plane and Blowing Stuff Up is also the one area where it’s a bit rubbish. I have enormous respect for any modern game that focusses on doing one thing well, and Ace Combat 7 is absolutely that… mostly. Here’s how I imagine the conversation between the developers went when making these decisions.ĭev 1: You know this whole “taking off” thing?ĭev 1: Well, it’s a bit boring, isn’t it?ĭev 2: It’s a pretty fundamental element of Flying a Cool Plane.ĭev 1: Yeah, but, it doesn’t involve any Blowing Stuff Up does it?ĭev 1: So why don’t we just let the player skip this bit and start the mission in the middle of the Blowing Stuff Up?ĭev 1: You know this whole “landing” thing…? In fact, Ace Combat 7 is so overwhelmingly concerned with these two things that it often deliberately sidelines other seemingly logical plane-related activities because they are not exciting enough. At a time when almost every AAA game needs to be a an open, shared, hybrid single and multiplayer world that’s competitive but also team-based with persistently evolving gameplay, a compelling endgame and a drone that serves you drinks while you play, Ace Combat 7 is about Flying a Cool Plane and Blowing Stuff Up. There’s something refreshingly straightforward about Ace Combat 7.
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