The only downside to this is that some of the weapons are so powerful that they’ll end up annihilating your own allies right alongside the enemy – this is annoying because many of the NPC fighters in the game like to swarm around a target, and it’s very difficult to get them to back off for a few seconds so you can unleash your mega-cannon. The AI fighters are depressingly basic in design. Even though you get three wingmen who are supposed to be flying the same fighters you are, they hardly use them to any effect.

You never see a friendly fighter use one of their larger torpedo weapons against a capital ship, and all they seem to do is chase after enemy fighters and launch the occasional missile. This was probably to keep the game challenging, but it gets really annoying when you realize you’re the only pilot in the game who actually knows how to use his weapons properly. Enemies put up even less of a fight, and the only time you die is when you get careless and ram a friendly ship, or a capital ship sprays you with anti-aircraft fire.

Not only are there some tremendously high-detail models flying around in the game, but very heavy use of bloom and pixel shader effects are used to add some extra pizzazz – while this makes the environments look hardly realistic, the benefit is a glorified show of colors and special effects which are often downright beautiful. Unfortunately, like many games, the bloom in Project Sylpheed ends up being overused in some places (making it nearly impossible to see), and it seems like the developers tried to wrestle a little too much out of the Xbox 360, as some of the special effects and explosions are so over-the-top that they drop the frame rates into the single-digit range.

Project Sylpheed is trying to do a bit more than it is capable of – not only due to the occasional graphical slowdown, but also because the gameplay is a bit repetitive and parts of the campaign feel a little rushed or misplaced. There’s also the disappointing lack of multiplayer (with some rebalancing this could have been an awesome co-op title), although some downloadable content has just recently been released to add some new challenges and weapons to the game. Still, Project Sylpheed still provides a great deal of gratuitous fun no matter how you look at it, and anybody who is looking forward to the upcoming Ace Combat 6 and wants something to play for the interim should definitely check it out.