The cockpit view remains intact, too, if you want to make the game so realistically difficult for yourself that it's barely playable.
It still takes a short period of adjustment before you're flying happily, and it'll still take much longer before you're really flying skilfully, but it takes away one of Ace Combat's major barriers to entry without sacrificing nuance for veterans who've been flying on Expert for years.
#Ace combat 4 soundtrack test flight series#
This is intended to be the Ace Combat that makes this unique but rather unfriendly series accessible, giving players more game-like controls to replace the flight-sim-esque configuration of its predecessors (though option to switch back remains hidden in a menu). You can machine gun them down, you can take their wings off – those kinds of dramatic moments are thanks to this new system.” But now you can see what you're shooting at. “It has this drastic and intense destruction effect, too – when you were chasing dots in previous games, you only saw popping far away when you actually attacked them. “The Close-Range Assault System enables a very intense close-range dogfight, whereas before you were shooting at dots,” says Kazutoki Kono, producer and executive director. And the ludicrous metal soundtrack, composed by series veteran Keiki Kobayashi, definitely helps.
It's much more immediate, and much more fun. This isn't picking off dots on the radar screen from a distance any more. Watching someone else play is almost enough to give you motion sickness, but when you're using it yourself it's genuinely, breath-holdingly exciting.Ĭhasing a skilled pilot at extremely high speeds and in completely unpredictable directions, weaving through buildings and trying to keep the missile lock trained on the plane ahead with the cacophonous roar of jet engines, missile explosions and machine-gun fire blasting from the speakers, brought me out in a bit of a sweat. When you hit something, the camera zooms right in to the explosion before pulling back to your plane. Its killer feature? The Close-Range Assault System, an up-close fight mode that zooms you in on an enemy and tracks their every veering movement with realistically violent shaky-cam effects, reducing your field of vision but bringing you physically closer to the action. Arcade flight combat like Wing Commander were all the rage in the 1990s, but for a long time the genre has been defined by dry, realistic, historical simulation rather than drama and explosions.Īce Combat: Assault Horizon clearly wants to be the game that changes that image. It's fair to say that flight combat hasn't been making anybody hot for quite some time.
Latest in the series was last year's Ace Combat: Joint Assault, after a three-year hiatus. Notoriously difficult flight combat games with a vocal hardcore following. Can Project Aces use up-close shooter action to make the flight combat sim exciting again? VG247 speaks to executive director Kazutoki Kono over a hands-on test.īegan in 1995 on PlayStation with Air Combat.