Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown
Flying high since ’95, Ace Combat 7: Skies Unkn own presents a spruced-up goose.
Aerial combat games can be split down the middle, more or less, according to which half of the ’90s they hark back to. Is it an ode to After Burner, all effortless loops and rolls? Or is it the kind of rigorous flight sim that flew so high in the decade’s latter half, almost invariably taking its name from a plane (see Falcon 4.0, B-17 Flying Fortress, et al), where even correctly retracting your landing gear is a real achievement. You don’t need me to tell you that Ace Combat 7 is the former. You can see by the screenshots, by the very name, that this is about getting you up in the air and feeling like Maverick ASAP, laws of physics be damned. It’s the latest in a 23-year-old franchise devoted to just that, no less. And on those terms, it’s a roaring success.
As with its predecessors, there are two different flight models available here, one professing to offer a simplified handling experience while the other offers a deeper simulation. In truth, neither one is particularly taxing, and the most discernible difference between them seems to be increased control of yaw and pitch in simulation mode. It’s Need for Speed handling in the air then, essentially, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. After an hour or so of chucking a fighter jet about with abandon, though, you do feel a desire to test your flight skills further than either model truly allows.
No, instead that challenge must be gleaned from Ace Combat 7’ s missions. They start off pedestrian, but kick into gear after three or four levels to reveal an unhinged campaign. What begins as 15 minutes of shooting at radar towers and the odd enemy fighter quickly descends into boss fights against impossible constructions, battles with drone swarms, and navigational setpieces straight from a Universal Studios ride. The demands of Ace Combat 7’ s campaign are matched perfectly with its accessible approach to flight simulation, throwing improbable machines and scenarios at you simply because it can.
Make it back to base after one of these delirious encounters, and you’ll earn some currency to spend on new weapons, plane upgrades, and entirely new aircraft via a huge and elaborate tech tree. The improvements to maneuverability are subtle when you upgrade a plane, but weapon additions can make you much more effective in certain missions—plus each new jet speaks to the five-year-old in all of us who finds them impossibly, unspeakably cool. Ace Combat knows this very well, you suspect, as it lingers on shots of them in selection screens before your sortie.
But is there enough variety? It seems ungrateful to even ask when you’ve just concluded a mission that requires you to navigate collapsing skyscrapers, but no, perhaps there isn’t. Despite all the bluster, it’s hard to shake the fatigue that comes with your 100th dogfight or ground attack. The settings change around, and sometimes the environment itself poses a hazard, but in the simplest terms the gameplay loop doesn’t evolve beyond aim, lock, and fire. That’s as much a genre problem as anything Ace Combat 7 does wrong in particular, and if you’re reading this review you’ve likely already made your peace with arcade flight simulator eccentricities. Still, that frustration exists.
Each new jet speaks to the five-year-old in all of us
Turbulence
There are more obvious negatives, though, like the unengaging cutscenes between missions, which hand on heart I really did try to follow, but quickly exceeded my threshold for narrative codswallop to the point where the words just didn’t register. Previous Ace Combat instalments made it their ‘thing’ to bark absurd dialogue at you until it became endearing. Some of that remains here, but Ace Combat 7 appears to want to be taken seriously for large chunks of time, and it doesn’t have the characterization— scratch that, enough of a semblance of sense—to really earn it.
I’ll not dwell on what’s ultimately a subjective aspect of the game, though, but will instead sing Ace Combat 7’ s praises for looking great without overly taxing your PC (there’s even a downsampling option!), but mostly for keeping the early ’90s arcade flight sim alive, prettier and weirder than ever.