ACE COMBAT™ 7: SKIES UNKNOWN

i like fighter jets also peak music

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while not the best AC, it's pretty damn good, the dlc missions are among the best in the series, which more than makes up for the sorta mid first half of the game this game has unfortunately attracted the worst kind of peoples, VR gimmick users and Flight sim fanatics, if it wasn't for them this game would have an overwhelmingly positive rating also you HAVE TO PLAY THE PS2 GAMES, the story expects that you do

The voice acting is bad, the dialogue is bad, the music is meh, but the actual flying and blowing things up is super fun. The missions are well designed.

Overall, I can’t help but feel mixed. It’s Ace Combat 7, of course it’s worth playing but by the end, I was glad it was over (in hindsight, for an arcade flight game maybe a lower difficulty would have been more enjoyable). The core of Ace Combat are the missions but there are too few in type: escort, score-attack, timed, canyons. Score-attack felt like the most prevalent. And while I don’t take issue with the mission type itself, what it amounted to on Hard and Ace difficulties was arbitrary point quotas within aggressive time limits constantly forcing me into hyper-optimized and repetitive paths rather than deliberate combat engagements. Of course Hard and Ace difficulties are going to be a challenge, but it felt artificial like the difficulty wasn’t earned and the buffer for mistakes was entirely removed. Every opponent was punishing without any satisfying challenge or increased complexity in their mechanics. More often than not progress was exhausting trial-and-error or required exact memorization. Escort missions. That’s all I need to say. One too many and any support was less than useless. Again, higher difficulties made for needlessly punishing runs having no room for error and fail states that restart almost the entirety of the mission. For a game as recent as 2019, the design of these missions was astoundingly antiquated. They offer nothing we haven’t seen from the series for the past 20 years but we are still having to suffer through them. Wingmen provide negligible assistance. With their damage output suppressed to nothing, friendlies exist as little more than ambient background decoration. Entire missions completed and entire battlefields cleared outright unassisted. No one plays ace combat for the plot, but what an absolute mess. I have an idea of the overall narrative, but the execution was handled appallingly. Characters introduced and written off, nobodies made out to be important and key figures reduced to the background. The culmination of some event the writers either forgot about or were themselves confused by. After three playthroughs, I still have no idea whose side I was on, nevermind that by the end [spoiler]no one else really knew who was from which country but at least they could all agree that the real bad guys are the drones[/spoiler]. Characters were some of the worst I had to sit through in any recent game. They feature entirely via Radio comms, just constant cliched dialogue of team work and camaraderie or your CO saying how worthless you are etc. Characters are on average absolutely insufferable to listen to and at their best are complete non-entities. Worse still by transferring from unit to unit to unit and having a rotating litany of team mates and support by the end I could not remember a single character and quite frankly [spoiler]could not care less if Strider 2 died in the final run, he followed me by his own volition and did nothing. Who even is he?[/spoiler]. To be fair, the plot was easily ignored as were the characters but that still leaves a lot of antiquated and poorly implemented gameplay mechanics: the punitive score-timer, the instant fail-states, the numerical difficulty, and limited mission types.

Immersive Arcade Fun: This is my first Ace Combat game I've played, and one thing I want to say off the bat is I found the story mediocre overall. It's not bad, the cutscenes look amazing, the dialogue during missions from characters can be charming and badass, and there are some really interesting concepts touched upon throughout. I personally feel it wasn't delivered very well - perhaps a bit rushed. However it does give the impression that the world of Ace combat is very vast, so maybe Ace Combat 7 is an odd entry point for new players. The gameplay is incredible, it gives the feeling of being overwhelmed and under pressure in the best possible way. Due to this it feels like its worth my time to to try out different aircraft, parts and strategies to get better scores on the campaign missions. The maps/environments are beautiful along with the general sounds which are informative as well as cinematic. It comes across that multiplayer rooms are very rare so you are most likely getting a campaign only experience. As I picked this up on sale this is fine by me, I also never intended to play PvP. When this game goes on sale, I recommend picking it up.

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