There are some games where I look blankly at the jewel case, quietly murmur "that's nice" in an apathetic manner, give the back-side with the pretty pictures a once-over, then move over back to the big blockbusters like Metal Gear Solid 3 or Resident Evil 4. Ace Combat 5 is, sadly, one such game - the kind of game that I'm now kicking myself for overlooking. To be honest, I was actually a little leery of the basic concept behind the game, as even though I've never been a person to get into complicated flight sims such as Lock On: Modern Air Combat, trying to play a modern air combat title purposely dumbed down for the masses felt wrong somehow. But sadly, what proved even more wrong was hesitating even for a second in the action of picking up Namco's recent addition to the PS2 lineup and giving it a thorough shakedown. Ace Combat 5 is my first introduction to the series, and I'll be damned if I'm struck with the overwhelming desire to play the rest of the titles in the series now. Here are my impressions on this excellent flight sim from Namco, as well as the limited-edition Hori Flightstick that shipped as a separate bundle designed exclusively for the game.
Ace Combat 5 takes place on a kind of "alternate Earth" with technology very similar to that of our own, but with a vastly different history and political layout. The game opens up into an uneasy stand-off situation between the two nations of Osea and Yuktobania. Ordinarily allies, the Yuktobanians (or Yukes have suddenly begun launching large-scale attacks into Osean territory. Caught up at the forefront of this new offensive is a single squadron located on - an Island - a small unassuming airbase in the middle of nowhere. The game opens up with a flight instructor, Captain Bartlett, being forced into an engagement with unknown enemy forces in the middle of a training mission, with a queasy journalist sitting in the co-pilot's seat, but as the intro movie goes on it becomes evident that these and a number of other characters are set to play a significant role in the conflict ahead. Meanwhile, the developers opted to take an "off-camera" approach to the player character, as while he's directly mentioned during the course of missions and a number of cutscenes, he's also never directly seen, leaving it up to the player to flesh out the finer details of their character however they see fit.
But this should hardly be regarded as a bad thing. One of Ace Combat 5's strongest elements is, surprisingly, the storyline something I wasn't expecting for a combat sim of this nature (you'll excuse the jaded attitude I've acquired over the many years since Freespace 2 was released) - and the passive approach taken to handling the player character has been carefully implemented to ensure an immersive experience, without actually ignoring the player'ssignificant role in the plotline. While working around this kind of thing is fairly simple in the mission scripting (you even get the chance to answer yes or no questions when NPCs address you directly, which can sometimes change the way a mission will play out), the cutscenes instead do this by playing out with the perspective and narration of one of the major characters, which does a fine job of keeping the flow and pacing of the story without alienating the player from what's going on or making him feel like his role is insignificant.
Of course, significant as it is, a game's storyline still plays a relatively small part in the grand scheme of things - a game still has to be physically fun to maintain its appeal to gamers, something that Ace Combat 5 actually manages to do. Air combat is, in fact, the basis for AC5's entire gameplay appeal, and it pulls this off in a remarkably fun manner. In fact, the way combat is handled makes it feel more like Freespace 2 with jet planes due to the way the somewhat arcade-ish way the game approaches combat by ignoring most forms of general physics in favor of accessible gameplay. Sure, planes still stall out if pointed directly upwards with the throttle set to zero, but things like g-forces, blackouts, aircraft stress, and other things one would normally expect to find in a complex flight sim are absent from Ace Combat 5. Now as all perfectly well know, Freespace 2 is hardly a bad game in spite of its lack of a fully realistic flight model, and the same ruling applies to AC5. This game is basically about taking the really cool parts of air combat (zooming around at a stupidly fast speed whilst lobbing dozens of missiles at an enemy formation) and expanding on them to make for a satisfying gameplay experience, and while it means that the somewhat dim-witted enemies are easy pickings for fast-learning players, it also means that the game is really easy to pick up and enjoy without having to spend half an hour figuring out the ten separate keystrokes required to properly arm and launch a missile. While some missions include little take-off / refueling / landing segments, the game's missions primarily focus on putting the player right into the action without having to suffer through extensive flight times or complex navigational concerns ·and while the hardcore sim gamer inside me is screaming bloody murder for appreciating such things about this game, a lack of a cohesive, dramatic storyline and intense, heavily-scripted missions are a couple of the things that turned me off from games like LOMAC and, opposingly, are what attract me so heavily to Ace Combat 5.
Further tilting the balance towards the less-than-realistic side of things for AC5 is the way fighters and their respective armaments are handled. The game? campaign employs a ?redit·system for upgrading the player? arsenal, offering access to better and more specialized aircraft as the game goes on and the player earns more points. New aircraft can be purchased by spending credits, although players have not only themselves, but their three wingmates to outfit as well, so setting up an entire wing with the best military hardware can be expensive. Aircraft are ranked in terms of basic speed, maneuverability, armor, and ?tability·(which I still haven? fully grasped the significance of yet, given how all of my aircraft seemed to handle in quite a ?table·manner regardless of this rating), as well as their overall air-to-air and air-to-ground offensive capabilities. Actual aircraft loadout is where things get interesting however, because the planes in this game can carry an average of forty-plus missiles - which at first seems like a bit much, but that's where I re-iterate the game's similarities to Freespace 2: namely the focus on blowing apart enemies, and lots of them. What really makes individual fighters unique, however, is the special weapon they come with. Some fighters (including the basic starting aircraft) come with simple unguided bomb droppers, while others come with more advanced weapons, like the F-22's multi-missile racks that can lob fast-moving explosive death at up to four targets at once.
Furthermore, certain planes have an ?xperience bar·that fills up the more the player uses it, eventually unlocking a plane variant that usually comes with improved statistics and a different special weapon. With all of this taken into consideration and the huge number of planes and variants the game features (anything from standard models like F-14s, F-15s, F-4s, and A-10s to even foreign models like Su's and Mig's), I'm really impressed at how AC5 manages to keep the available arsenal interesting. Yes, there are a few dud weapons and planes that aren't really useful in the face of superior hardware (like a napalm dropper), but for the most part each piece of hardware seems to have a defining purpose in the game, and the fact that players can take advantage of a game+ mode·adds a huge bonus to the game's replayability department, as this allows existing credits and purchased planes to carry over into a new game (and some planes can't be obtained without playing through the game once or twice). I'm really quite impressed with the game's arsenal.
The actual combat experience itself is also quite involved. Initially it appears to consist of little more than flying towards an enemy and getting a missile lock, but it rapidly becomes clear that there's a lot more to the game than that. The generic missiles each fighter is given actually have a pretty poor level of guidance, so this combined with the game's slightly odd lack of countermeasures makes evading missiles a bit of a skillful art (as well as an excuse to pull off a bunch of cool maneuvers) for both the player and the NPCs around him. Shooting down an enemy involves either getting close enough to use his fighter's machineguns, or trying to get behind an enemy in such a way that he'll have a hard time avoiding the guided missile once it's in the air. Given how some enemies can become incredibly evasive once they notice they've shot at, trying to out-maneuver somebody to re-acquire lock and that perfect shot can be an intense experience. The AI is also pretty decent (friendly wingmen in particular do a good job of engaging targets in that they actually get a kill every once in awhile - you'd be surprised at how few fighter-combat games actually bother with this little detail - but I feel they ultimately could've done a little better), though I found the enemy combat AI to be somewhat easy-going. Yes, they consistently locked onto me when I became a threat and kept me on my toes with occasional missile launchers or machinegun attacks, but whenever I felt I was getting in over my head, all I had to do was switch on my afterburners and pull some crazy evasive stunts for a bit, and even though I got careless and occasionally got shot down (or worse, collided with something), I never actually got the feeling that I was physically being challenged by an enemy attack ·more that it was an annoyance that I could simply swat away like a fly whenever it got in my way, and the only damage I received was incurred when I got careless. Perhaps things are different on the extreme ace difficulty mode (which I have yet to try), but on the conventional, standard difficulty modes, enemy fighters are sadly quite the pushover.
The game's campaign spans the length of around 27 missions, which is actually quite an impressive figure these days, but also spices things up a bit with a couple of "sub-missions" and even a small degree of branching. At a couple of points in the campaign, a dialogue choice (one of those ?es/no·things I mentioned above) on the player's part determines which mission branch he'll play next, although this decision is placed in such a subtle manner that I actually missed it at first, because the ensuing cutscene makes it appear as if the choice is random by the flip of a coin. One thing I want to point out is that the pre-mission briefings are incredibly detailed, useful, and - best of all - cool to watch and listen to, which is significant because I see far too many campaign-driven games thinking they can get away with a simple text briefing (which most of the time aren't even narrated) to introduced a player to his mission. A shout out to game developers: this does not work. Games like Freespace 2, and now, Ace Combat 5 clearly show how to properly flesh out the details of the player's next mission by augmenting the situation with cutscenes, explicit verbal information, and multi-paged visual briefings that give the player a full sense of the situation, rather than just plunging him into a situation with only the most basic information for support. This kind of approach helps keep the flow and immersion level of the game enormously and is well-worth the extra development time and effort, as is exactly the case here. Sorry for going off on a brief tangent, but it annoys me to see so many games thinking they can get away with only half-assed briefings when even a little thing like this can be so integral to the experience, as I'vee encountered many games over the last couple of years ended up placing me into numerous situations where I just plain didn't give a damn what was going on due to a lack of information on the situation at large. Now that I've got that off my chest, I'll end this segment by saying that my only dislike about AC5's available gameplay options is that there is no multiplayer ·Obviously co-op play for this game would have been one of the coolest things ever, but even some work into a competitive mode with all the different plane types could've been a cool secondary option. Still, this hardly degrades from the experience, and I'll gladly do without it if it means the singleplayer experience would have suffered any.
Ace Combat 5's graphics engine is one thing I was actually somewhat worried about when I first picked it up. Having been spoiled at the kind of graphical splendor a detailed simulator game can offer on a high-end PC, I was skeptical on if the PS2's limited specifications could offer. Thankfully, the game exceeded my expectations and actually looks very impressive in action. The framerate is consistently fluid, and despite trying my damndest I was unable to get it to slow down even the slightest. Planes look exquisitely detailed, with some nicely detailed textures (and a limited amount of custom skin support new skins can be unlockedat certain junctures in the campaign) and a good, accurate level of detail for each aircraft, but the engine is also rife with some really nice special effects, including little heat blurs from a fighter's engine wash when the throttle is cranked up, some really nice afterburner effects, good explosions, and some really damn fine looking terrain and water. The visibility distance is also good ·I feel it could've stretched out a little further, but I found the current setting more than acceptable. I was also really impressed with the weather effects, which do a really great job of conveying a fierce thunder or snow storm in some missions with poor environmental conditions (especially from the cockpit view).
Despite Ace Combat 5's wealth of graphical splendor, there are still one or two exclusions in the special effects and general art department that I found quite noticeable. Particularly, I found that the lack of smoke trails on damaged planes was a little disappointing ·in fact, I couldn't really notice any damage effects at all, particularly while looking at my own plane in third person when it was crippled. And while the cockpit views are pretty detailed (which I was happy with ·I always love it when a game ships with a well-rendered cockpit perspective), they are also totally unanimated. I thought it would've been cool if players could get a little extra targeting information on the MFDs or something when playing from that view, but I'm happy enough to live without it, and the ability to at least look around the cockpit in full 3D is quite cool as it is. And I eventually even started to notice some weird graphical quirks, like planes physically phasing through the terrain in several levels (and this wasn't just a random act - this seemed specifically scripted to happen in certain missions that required following a plane closely), but this wasn't really enough to detract from the experience any until I had gone through the game a couple of times and was actually able to notice it. Otherwise, Ace Combat 5's graphics engine is just another strong asset to what is already a very fine game.
