Ace Combat 7
Ace Combat 7 is an arcade dogfighter game, with fantastic aircraft handling, combat and visuals; which is wonderful as there are so few of those. I loved HAWX many years ago and have often looked out for a more modern version. The flying, sound effects and controls are all excellent and I REALLY enjoy the gameplay. The major drawback is.. everything else. The voice acting, the writing, the endless cutscenes all detract from what is otherwise an extremely enjoyable air combat game. The first half hour is one 10 minute mission, and 25 minutes of cut scenes. Multiplayer is dead, and I completed the campaign in 11 hours, so I can't recommend paying 60 euros for it.
Pros
- Looks fantastic
- Really good controls
- Sound effects and combat feedback are excellent
- The game makes you feel like a badass
- Blowing up targets on the ground is especially satisfying
- 20 campaign missions
- The voice acting is good, but the writing isn't
- Large number of planes and equipment to unlock
- Using numbers to designate planes makes them difficult to tell apart
- Really satisfying to fly around blowing stuff up
- Good variety of enemies between different planes, ground vehicles, planes and boats
Cons
- The nation names they chose are confusing. I spent most of the campaign wondering who's side I was on between Erusea and Osea, which sound very similar
- The Aircraft Tree where you unlock new planes and weapons does a terrible job of showing you the differerences between planes
- Waaaaaayyy too many cutscenes
- You can really tell the voice acting and writing for missions was translated. Sentences make almost no sense, topics change immediately (even between sentences), voice intonation is totally off - like they got someone to read each sentence in isolation then glued them all together
- No checkpoints in 20 minute missions, and no repairs. I regularly get shot down right before the end of a mission which is really frustrating having to play through the whole thing again
- If there IS a checkpoint, and you die after reaching it, you get all your health and missiles back
- The difficulty spikes a lot. Some missions it took me 6 attempts (with no checkpoints) to finally complete. Some I did with no thinking at all on the first try. Fleet Destruction is a good example - it took me a long time to work out how to get enough points without being shot down. Followed by a mission where you just fly through a canyon then shoot down a small number of helicopters.
- The boss fights are boring. There's a few missions where an enemy plane shows up that defies the laws of physics, jinks out of the way of missles and is impossible to hit, so you just fly around aimlessly for 10 minutes trying to get an angle to shoot at it