I beat Ace Combat: Assault Horizon this evening. (Looking at the clock, it’s nearly 2am… I guess I was enjoying myself, huh.)

I’ve already said a lot of the things I want to say about this game in yesterday’s post, but having played the whole thing through from start to finish now, I feel I can talk about it with a bit more confidence.

The thing I most want to talk about, I think, is what it was clearly going for and whether or not it was successful.

What it was clearly attempting to go for was a dramatic military-style story with a personal angle. And, well, not to put too fine a point on it, but it failed. Not miserably, but it still fell very short of what I can only assume were the team’s ambitions.

To put this in context for those of you unfamiliar with the game, let me explain a little. The majority of Assault Horizon casts you in the role of Colonel Bishop, an ace fighter pilot who is wracked with recurring nightmares about facing off against a “shark-faced” rival ace. (Indeed, the first level is a dream sequence that — spoiler — you re-enact for real later in the game, only things turn out a little differently.) Bishop becomes embroiled in a war between the free world (the real world, unlike many other Ace Combat titles) and an army of Russian rebels. (This latter aspect allows the game to follow the Unwritten Law of Jet Fighter Games, which is that you must spend the majority of your time shooting down MiG-29s and SU-27s.) Said Russian rebels have access to a weapon called “Trinity” — an incredibly powerful nuclear device that you see the devastating effects of firsthand in several of the early levels. Naturally, it’s up to Bishop to put a stop to all this nonsense by flying shiny planes very fast and blowing lots of things up.

Except it’s not just up to Bishop; there are also a couple of other characters who provide a vehicle (no pun intended) for the other types of mission you’ll be flying aside from air-to-air combat and air-to-ground assaults. One guy flies helicopters, so you get to play as him during the helicopter missions; the token ladypilot flies bombers, so you get to play as her during the few bombing missions — including a pretty cool “stealth” one where you have to avoid enemy radar cones.

The setup is fairly interesting, then; Bishop has the potential to be an intriguing character, confronting his own personal demons over the course of the story and developing into someone “human” as it progresses. Unfortunately, this potential is left largely unrealised; a short monologue at the end of the game suggests that he has learned something from his experiences, but the rest of the game’s narrative really didn’t make that particularly clear.

Things are worse with the other characters, who pretty much only appear to be there for the sake of it. Ladypilot is shoehorned into a rather hasty apparent romance plot in the final scenes of the game, having spent the rest of the game showing no form of interest in Bishop whatsoever, and Helicopter Man is… well, he flies helicopters.

Perhaps the biggest wasted opportunity is the “villain”, who is teased a little early in the game — the “shark-faced” pilot from Bishop’s dreams — and then introduced rather hastily towards the end. He’s given little in the way of explanation, and his own personal motivations are pretty much used to bludgeon the player over the head with to say “This! Is! Why! He’s! Evil!” at one point. He’s a pain in the arse to shoot down in the final mission, so there’s a certain degree of personal satisfaction in blowing him up, but this finale could have been so much more interesting if there were a lot more interaction between him and Bishop throughout the game. It is a poor antagonist who only reveals himself in the final chapters of a story, and it leaves Markov feeling like a rather weak adversary for Bishop.

Despite all that I’ve said above, however, Assault Horizon was an enjoyable experience in the way that a good action movie (with equally ill-defined characters) is. The missions were varied and fun — though a couple dragged on a little too long — and the presentation throughout was immaculate; the PC version looks lovely, and the action is accompanied by some wonderful music and excellent voice acting just to add to the whole “movie-like” feel.

It’s just a pity so many opportunities for interesting narrative development were squandered, leaving the whole experience feeling a bit hollow afterwards. I’m not sorry I played it, as on the whole I did enjoy it immensely, but now my appetite has been well and truly whet for the earlier — apparently much better — installments in the Ace Combat series, which hopefully I will be getting my hands on very soon.

Following on from yesterday’s post, today I decided to give Ace Combat: Assault Horizon a try, partly because I was impatient to get started on my journey through the Ace Combat series, and partly because I was conscious of the fact it had been in my Steam library since one sale or another and I had never even installed it, let alone tried it.

Ace Combat: Assault Horizon is pretty much the black sheep of the Ace Combat franchise, so I figured it probably wouldn’t be a terrible idea to try it first. That way I can see what the series is like now, and then compare it to what it was in the PS2 era. Ace Combat fans do not have the luxury of doing it this way around, so they inevitably see it as a series in decline — particularly now it’s made the jump to free-to-play on PlayStation 3.

Now, as noted, I have no frame of reference for the rest of the series as yet, but if the other games are even half as enjoyable as Assault Horizon appears to be — and I’m led to believe that they’re considerably better — then I’m very much in for a treat. But more on that when my copies arrive.

For now, let’s talk a little about Assault Horizon. It was referred to by some on its original launch as being Call of Duty in the sky, and this isn’t an altogether inaccurate comparison. There are lots of characters who have little in the way of… you know, character development, but who provide the framework for the different types of mission (one dude is a fighter pilot, another dude is a helicopter pilot, the token ladypilot flies bombers and transports); the missions and story are very much pre-scripted to fit the overall narrative; the narrative itself makes little in the way of sense but is enjoyable from the perspective of it simply being spectacular to watch.

And, for all the shit Call of Duty gets, this isn’t a bad thing for this sort of game. Air combat should be spectacular and exciting — at least, if you’re taking the “action movie” approach to it, as this game is — and when you approach it with that attitude, it doesn’t matter so much that the game just flat-out defies the laws of physics on numerous occasions with regard to how the various vehicles handle. (The way the helicopter dodges missiles with a ridiculous barrel roll is a particular highlight.)

So far the combat itself has been enjoyable and satisfying, too. Early in the game, you can pretty much get someone in your sights and fire off a missile at them, but as you progress you start having to pull off more and more fancy manoeuvres to get into a position to get a kill. And it’s here that the game’s most controversial addition to Ace Combat veterans shows its head: Dogfight Mode.

Dogfight Mode is… well, I’m not really sure how it works, but I do know it’s ridiculous. Rather than having to worry too much about pointing your plane in the right direction, Dogfight Mode consists of a sort of autopilot as you tail an enemy, though you still have to roll and pitch in order to keep them centred in a large circle on the screen in order to lock on with missiles. It’s usually the most reliable means of ensuring you down an enemy — particularly the stronger “leader” enemies — but it’s also used for some very silly white-knuckle setpieces throughout, as your quarry leads you on a merry chase between skyscrapers (with things like cranes collapsing around you, naturally) or perilously close to the ground. (And yes; turn the assist options off and the flight controls to the “proper” ones and you can indeed slam into the ground and immediately bring your mission to a premature end, like any good air combat game worth its salt.)

I fired Assault Horizon up out of curiosity earlier and have found myself playing it pretty much all evening. While I’m conscious of numerous things it could do a bit better, I’ve enjoyed my time with it so far, and I’m feeling like it was a good choice to give this one a try first, because from what I understand, things only get better from here. My mild curiosity has been upgraded to “can’t wait” status.

Fox two, fox two.