Ace Combat 6

AMN’s Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don’t waste your time. This is why we’ve split our reviews into four sections: What the Game’s About, What’s Hot, What’s Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.

What the Game’s About
Namco’s Ace Combat franchise has been flying high since the days of the original Playstation. The series is built on an appealing combination of simulation and arcade elements that puts players behind the controls of real-world aircraft, but streamlines the actual process of flying in order to focus the gameplay on high-speed dog-fighting. Ace Combat 6 marks the franchise’s next-generation debut as well as the first time the series has appeared on a non-Playstation platform. With gorgeous graphics, perfect controls, online-play and an absurdly melodramatic storyline, Ace Combat 6 offers players everything one would expect from a next-generation Ace Combat title and absolutely nothing more. The game is well-made and will undoubtedly please fans of the series, but it doesn’t go far enough beyond the call of duty to push itself into ‘must own’ territory.

What’s Hot
Namco has made great use of the next-generation power at their disposal. Ace Combat 6 absolutely nails the feeling of screaming through the skies at mach 3 and beyond. No, scratch that, Ace Combat 6 nails the way we all dream flying a fighter jet would feel, an exaggerated, testosterone-fueled take on the reality of aerial combat. At the core of the experience lies the same elegant flight model fans of the series have grown accustomed to over the last several games – right down to the perfectly-weighted planes, but the immersive value of that flight model has been powerfully enhanced by an increased sense of speed, vast gorgeous environments, and metric tons of lighting, particle and blur effects. We can argue graphics don’t matter until our throats are sore but the increased visual fidelity in Ace Combat 6 does an amazing job of making the player feel like they are inside the cockpit of a hundred-million dollar jet, and that adds a hell of to the sum entertainment value for a game of this type.

The power of the Xbox 360 has also been levied toward impressively large-scale battles throughout the single-player campaign. From afar players will routinely observe aerial battlegrounds filled with twisting contrails from dozens of bogies bartering for position in the air and missiles persistently tailing their targets. A few seconds worth of overdrive and players will find themselves in the heart of the action, spiraling through the explosion-laden skies as they evade enemy attacks while attempting to lock on to equally evasive targets. The enemy and allied AI in the Ace Combat series has always been top notch but Namco has managed to improve it, as there are now more combatants in play at any given time and all of them are more adept at breaking missile locks and maneuvering into position for the kill. The dog-fights are marvelously intense and often lengthy affairs where enemy combatants and allied wingmen alike pull off high-G turns, spirals, loops and all manners of twists in order to gain the advantage. Returning gameplay mechanics like calling on wingmen for support and exiting the hot zone to refuel and reload ammunition have been further refined and the missions have been expanded to include multiple, shifting objectives, all of which contribute to an extremely compelling campaign.

The campaign is complemented by a decent offering of multiplayer modes. There’s Battle Royale, or deathmatch, which is basically a chaotic cherry-picker’s paradise where players will constantly have their dog-fights interrupted by the warning buzzer of a third-party missile lock. Team Deathmatch is more fun since players don’t have to worry about every plane in the sky and dog-fights last significantly longer as a result. It’s basically Halo 3 team-deathmatch in the sky – the more experienced, hardcore players can do better by communicating the status and positions of the enemy, but most players can still have a good time by simply trying to rack up as many kills as possible toward the team total. Siege pits two teams of seven against each other in an attack/defend mission and is the best competitive mode of the bunch. Finally, the game offers players the ability to team up with a buddy and play together through two of the campaign’s missions. Unlike the single-player missions, players can respawn and rejoin the battle but each death comes with a time penalty – die too many times and its mission failed. This is bar none the best multiplayer option in the game, and it hurts that Namco only included a few missions instead of a whole campaign’s worth. Online play was relatively lag-free and the ability to dog-fight with other human players instead of AI adds a lot of replayability to the Ace Combat experience.

What’s Not
There only real major problem facing Ace Combat 6 is a lack of creativity on Namco’s part, and while it’s not enough of a problem to hurt the game substantially it does keep the game from ascending to that upper echelon of the 360 software lineup. Ace Combat 6 suffers from its ties to reality in that the reality of modern aerial combat is not a particularly exciting one. High-speed planes and long-range missiles means combat is usually a matter of locking onto dots in the distance and firing missiles, and Namco hasn’t done enough to elevate the core gameplay beyond that reality. The improved enemy AI means players will have to be a bit more persistent than in the past and should expect more than a few wasted shots, but in the end, the final kill will still take place in the distance just as they always have. Which brings us to the other criticism brought on by Namco’s lack of creativity – Ace Combat 6 just feels too much like its predecessors. Mechanics have been refined, graphics have been improved, and the entire experience is certainly better overall than any of the previous Ace Combat games, but not by enough of a leap to keep the proceedings from feeling all too familiar. Obviously they have a formula that works, but if they really are so resistant to change that they couldn’t even add one more major gameplay-changing feature, then they should really think about supporting this game for years with DLC instead of releasing another familiar sequel too soon.

Speaking of DLC, the multiplayer needs some – badly. The co-operative multiplayer mode is easily the most enjoyable out-of-the-box experience in Ace Combat 6, but players only have two missions to play with before they’ve fully explored everything the mode has to offer. We’ve racked our brains and we can’t think of a good reason why every one of the campaign missions can’t be included as cooperative missions, and if we’ve missed the reason somehow then Namco needs to get to work on some new co-op specific missions because this mode is too much fun to under-deliver on. Furthermore, Ace Combat 6 features a few environments or arenas for the competitive modes, but none of them really play all that differently than the others. They’re all fairly wide open spaces with varying scenery around and beneath the planes. The reason we consider Siege mode to be the best of the competitive modes is because the nature of the objectives, gun emplacements and the like add some tangible variety to the gameplay. Compared to the distinct arenas in a game like Crimson Skies, each of which offered their own nuances and strategies, the offerings in Ace Combat 6 are pretty flat.

Finally, Ace Combat 6 features a fairly decent storyline that focuses on one family and how war tears their lives apart. Unfortunately, this is aerial combat game and not much of the story ties directly into the actual gameplay. The jarring transition from a ‘dramatic’ scene (we’ll explain the quotes shortly) on the ground to the action in the air makes the narrative feel completely disconnected and artificial even if the central concepts and themes are intriguing. Even worse than the disconnect from the action is the horrific quality of the dialog and voice acting that carries most of the story. Nobody will miss anything crucial by skipping the painful cinematics that push the story forward between missions, so we recommend just treating the game as a series of vaguely connected missions from the perspective of a nameless pilot. Trust us on this.

Final Word
We brought up previous Ace Combat titles quite frequently in this review. That’s generally a practice we like to avoid, but in this case it was pretty much inevitable. Ace Combat 6 doesn’t take any huge leaps over the previous installments in the franchise save for its presentation values, and the result is a game that feels almost exactly like its predecessors, only better. If you loved any or all of the previous Ace Combat games, we recommend you pick up Ace Combat 6 immediately. If you were never a fan of the franchise or the genre before, Ace Combat 6 doesn’t offer anything that will change your mind.