Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown
Release Date: January 31, 2019
Systems: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Windows, Linux, SteamOS, Nintendo Switch
Publisher: Bandai Namco Entertainment
Developer: Bandai Namco Studios
Time Spent: 21 Hours 42 Minutes
Post-Game Playthrough Videos on YouTube
[For my first impressions and initial thoughts about this game, you can read my First Impressions article here.]
I think I can safely say that it took me six years to come back to the
Ace Combat series because
Ace Combat: Assault Horizon left such a bad taste in my mouth that I felt completely disillusioned with the series. I had no desire to return to this franchise if that was the direction Project Aces was taking. I had ignored all trailers for the game, didn't read any of the reviews, and had just written off
Ace Combat altogether. That was a mistake since, for me,
Ace Combat 7 felt like a return to form, to a type of arcade shooter flight-sim that I loved, although it still has some elements that I'm not particularly a fan of. That's bound to happen with nearly any franchise, so I'm not salty about not liking every single little thing about this game.
Ace Combat 7 follows the familiar gameplay loop that I love about the series. There's a debriefing about the mission with computerized gridlines and arrows in place of planes and enemy troops, with the audio and dialogue as if you're in a briefing room receiving intel before a mission. Occasionally there's banter between characters, but the protagonist is always silent. You then proceed to the hangar where you select your plane, weapons loadout, and modifications you want to add to your plane, such as increased standard missile load (from a measly 60 missiles up to 80ish+), increased armor to buff guns and missile defense, or whatever is needed to outfit a plane to increase maneuverability. You can also select the paint job on your plane if that's your thing, although it's really only beneficial in a superficial way for multiplayer and has zero impact on actual gameplay. Then you're off in your plane and participating in the mission.
By completing missions, you earn points you can use to buy more advanced planes, special weapons (like advanced missiles and bombs), or modifications that work on any plane, regardless of type or where you bought the upgrade in the plane/skill tree. Think of it like spending experience points in an RPG. By completing the main campaign, which took me about 19 hours on Easy (there were some instant death missions that I was struggling with that I'll get to later), there were still a lot of planes that I hadn't unlocked because of how expensive they were, and I would tend to buy any modification I came across because I wasn't sure if it was something that would come in handy in a mission down the road, or if I thought I might actually need to have a quick de-icer on my plane while flying through clouds at high altitudes. The point is, at least on Easy, and a handful of missions I've beaten on Normal and Hard difficulty settings, that you're going to need to do a bit of grinding in the campaign mode to unlock all of the planes; some of which you have to buy to gain access to other planes along the same airplane tree (ie, if you want to buy the F-15E Strike Eagle, you'll also have to buy either the F-15J or F-15C Eagle first). Let's briefly get to the aspects of the game that I wasn't a fan of, because while at times it felt like a lot, looking back, it really wasn't.
The first time the game throws something at you that isn't a straight "go kill enemy bogies" is Mission 7: First Contact. You're initially tasked with destroying radar sights in a mountainous area filled with sky-reaching pinnacles. You soon discover that a thunderstorm has encroached on your area, and so you have to now fly through heavy rainfall while tracking enemy planes and radar sites, which isn't too bad until you factor in the lightning. If/when you get hit by lightning, you briefly lose control of your plane; your radar and HUD fail, leaving you to have to target enemies manually while also fighting to regain control of your plane while not crashing into the surrounding mountains. Then at the end of the mission, you have to fly against an enemy plane that's effectively a mini-boss fight, rain, lightning, and all. I'm sure the lightning strike RNG is purely random, but it's really hard not to feel that the game is purposefully targeting your plane specifically when you're about to either lock on or fire a missile.
Immediately following Mission 7, in Mission 8: Pipeline Destruction, you have to fly through a desert during a sandstorm, which restricts your radar capabilities. In the back end of the mission, you have to track down 20 tanker trucks moving speedily through the desert like they're in a Mad Max movie, again, while you have limited radar capabilities that will flicker on and off during the sandstorm. And then in the back half of this part of the mission, you have the additional headache of dealing with the super agile UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, an attack drone) which doesn't seem to be affected by the sandstorm at all. If any of the fuel tanker trucks make it out of the combat zone, you have to start over from the last checkpoint.
The last gimmick that I want to harp on about is that, in the second half of the game, the antagonists have knocked out GPS systems, which means that while your radars do work, they have limited functionality. First, targeting is spotty, so sometimes you might be able to lock on to an enemy, and other times your HUD will flicker off. Combined with this is the added complication that, for some missions, because the loss of GPS is a multi-mission problem, you can't tell who is a friendly and who is an enemy until you're almost within a hundred yards or so. So when you're flying 2,560 kph, that distance comes up on you really quick.
Not so much a gimmick but more of a feature in this game is that the enemy have a hard-on for the aforementioned UAVs. Once they're introduced in Mission 2, almost every mission, at some point, will feature a veritable swarm of these quick little bastards. What makes these speedy little shits so annoying is that it makes the missions hard to plan for if you're trying to roleplay in any kind of logical manner. When you receive a mission briefing about having to attack ground forces, take out trucks, tanks, and structures, you would normally think to bring in a plane whose speciality is Air-to-Ground, like the wonderful A-10 Warthog. But no, that would be a bad choice, because halfway through the mission, you might be tasked with having to take out 15-20 of these quick attack drones, or god-forbid, another encounter with the mini-boss, Mister X, and trying to do that in a plane that flies like an overweight elephant armed with a front-mounted 30mm Gatling gun and a handful of missiles is not the ideal situation to be in. This is probably the reason why there aren't a lot of air-to-ground-focused planes in this game.
I guess I just wish that there were more simplistic missions where you just had to go out and destroy a bunch of stuff within your 20-minute time limit. But I guess that's what free play mode is for.
But you know what? Despite all of the complaints I have about this game, I still loved it. Like I said up at the top, I felt like I was able to fall in love with this series all over again. I enjoyed the minorly convoluted story, where the narrator was a woman whose story ran tangentially to the playable main character for the first quarter of the game. I liked the arc of the playable character and how they fit within the overarching narrative. The game had a lot of elements that I love from the series, like stupidly large enemy ships with a 3,600-foot wingspan, planes that can carry 100+ missiles, planes that can generate force fields, flying into an underground/underwater tunnel that was 100% not designed for a full-assed-size plane to fly through, and orbital space laser cannons. It's ridiculous, and I love it.
On the Steam Deck, the game ran fine for the most part, with some of the load times taking, at most, just under a minute. The game ran at a consistent 60fps with the settings at a mix of medium, high, and max. If I don't have the Steam Deck plugged in, I can play for about an hour before the battery dips below 20%, which isn't good, but I rarely play unplugged, so it's not really an issue for me. I cannot think of a lot of games where the game offers me a replay feature, and I'll watch the entire thing all over again because the game makes my gameplay look like I'm a complete bad-ass. I'll sometimes even watch the slightly faster-than-real-time playback on a computer grid where your plans are just arrows and trail lines because it's fun to watch yet another angle of what I just played. With that in mind, the actual time to beat the campaign on easy is probalby probably closer to only about 10, but that's just for a single run through on Easy. I'm sure that if I were focused on playing on Hard, getting S rank on all of the missions and buy the X-02S Strike Wyvern, I could probably put in at least another 30 hours and all of the things that bothered me would just be minor annoyances.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental
P.S. If you watched any of my videos, you'll notice that I never used defensive flares, but not because I never felt that I needed them, but because I never figured out which button to press to use them. Every so often, I would press different buttons to try and figure out how to use them, but nothing ever worked, so I just went without them.
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