Newly released in the field of “ridiculously hard-to-justify purchases” is Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation – or, more specifically, its associated limited controller bundle. Once upon a time, Namco released Ace Combat 5 for the PlayStation 2 platform in two iterations: One was just the stand-alone game release meant for use with the regular gamepad, while the second was a full-blown controller bundle, complete with a modified Saitek joystick that could be played seamlessly with the game (as well as Ace Combat 4 and the follow-up Ace Combat Zero). While the joystick was solid, and being able to use it with all three games in the series provided an unquestionably superior immersive experience, many people found it hard to justify the purchase given how the controller only functioned with the Ace Combat titles, and couldn’t even be used on PC until some third-party hacked drivers came out.
Nevertheless, the bundle obviously provided some measure of commercial success, as Namco has now put out a new bundle to go with Ace Combat 6. The biggest reason for this is that the developers have decided to kick Sony in the bean-bag and jump over to the Xbox 360, meaning that a new approved controller had to be released for compatibility and certification reasons. Hence, my review of the game will address both Ace Combat 6 as a game, as well as how the controller itself stands up as a viable purchase - especially for those few who already own the previous bundle.
The main draw for the series has always been in the storyline. This is by no means a true flight-sim (a fact that likely gives most purists cause to turn their noses up regularly), and instead the more action-oriented gameplay is roped around dramatic storylines, inspiring music, and awkwardly-translated dialogue that somehow turns out awesome to listen to in the middle of a pitched battle. With these elements seamlessly combined together, you’ll find yourself caring less about the fact that your plane can somehow carry ninety missiles and more so be caught up in the rampaging, conspiracy-laden war between two given nations.
Ace Combat 6 takes place in the peaceful (and fictional) land of Emeria, where out of the blue, their neighboring nation of Estovakia decides to invade. Losing air supremacy almost immediately thanks to a barrage of high-explosive cruise missile attacks, the Emerians are forced to abandon their capital city of Gracemaria and rally around a distant island for a counter-attack.
The campaign feels moderately shorter than other games, with barely any of the expected surprises or sudden plot twists. Without giving any spoilers, I was pretty disappointed that they didn’t explore the angle of why Estovakia was invading in more detail (beyond “our economy is in ruins and we elected a bunch of psychopathic military guys to lead us”), and instead focuses more on an Emerian mother who loses her child and husband early in the conflict, but begins frantically searching for a way to get back into Gracemaria upon learning her daughter is still alive. The scriptwriters seemed to be going for a more “down to earth” feel to see how the war affects the major characters first-hand, but it felt much more difficult to get drawn into the story than with the directly-addressed Blaze / Cipher personas of Ace Combat 5 and Zero. The game still offers many bad-ass moments where characters are referring directly to your pilot-persona and performing the tactical equivalent of running in fear, but these occurrences are noticeably subdued from that of previous games.
Even though the number of missions in the campaign (about 15 in total) gives the game a bit of a short feel, there are a couple of gameplay additions to keep things interesting. First, unlike previous games, many of the missions in the game are split up into multiple sub-operations. This means instead of having to frantically fly across one end of the map to the other to try and accomplish everything, you can just pick and choose which sub-objectives you want to complete until the minimum goal is met. The radar can thankfully be filtered by individual operation objectives to make sorting things easier, as the battles are much more “busy” and chaotic than that of previous games – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
A second major addition is that of “Allied Support”. The developers are finally addressing the issue of AI support being useless by giving you a more direct means of controlling friendly craft. Basically, as you clear each objective, friendly planes (or even ground assets) will be ‘freed up’ from the engagement and will follow you around. For the most part they’ll annoyingly do nothing, but every now and again you can initiate either an “Allied Attack” or “Allied Cover” command, in which case all of these assets will simultaneously attack the targets you designate – or the targets attacking you. This can actually make it ludicrously easy to clean up what would otherwise be a prolonged air-battle in the previous games, but the mission targets are sufficiently spread out and challenging that it provides a helpful benefit when carefully deployed, rather than being too unbalancing.
