ACE COMBAT™ 7: SKIES UNKNOWN

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.