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Arts & Entertainment

Ace Combat: Assault Horizon

The skies are friendlier than they should be.

     Well, with the wounds closing up from last week’s flogging at the hands of Dark Souls, I decided to drop the sword and shield for a while and hopped into the cockpit to take on Ace Combat: Assault Horizon. Hilariously enough, it's published by Namco-Bandi, the same company that made Dark Souls.

     Being a pilot myself (well, certified to fly without an instructor, anyway) I’ve actually never been big into flight sims. My only experience with them was when I was a chubby kid with a buzz cut and bent glasses (as opposed to today, where I am a chubby adult with a buzz cut and bent glasses). It was the original Microsoft Flight Simulator on my Dad’s 400-pound computer with Windows 95. I remember flying a polygon 747 over endless fields green and brown patches with the occasional grey rectangle sticking up from them-good times. 

     I guess I’ve never been into them because I’ve been around aircraft my entire life. My father is a pilot for a major airline, so I was practically raised on passenger jets. Not to mention that I have experience in piloting, so my sixty hours of experience in a Cessna obviously beats any flight sim.

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     Right, so anyway, here we go with Ace Combat.

Plot and Characters 

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     Wow-where to begin? It’s an emotional thrill-ride from beginning to end; a gripping tale of love and redemption that will leave you clinging to the edge of your seat, completely engrossed and yearning for every second of literary genius and cinematic thrill.

     Had you going there, didn’t I? Nah, it’s your standard assembly-line military plot: you start off fighting terrorists in a remote part of the world, and then later you fight terrorists in a well-developed part of the world. And of course someone betrays because they always do.

     To give you a little more insight, you take the roles of several of the games’ characters, but the story centers around Colonel William Bishop. I assume that the name inspired by Billy Bishop, an Ace of World War I who racked up seventy-two kills though the course of the war. But then, given how little the game’s writers and developers seem to know about flying or military procedure, it could just as well be a coincidence.

     Anyway, Bishop and his four buddies (whom I found so complex and interesting that I can’t remember a single one of their names) are members of NATO Task Force 108 stationed somewhere in East Africa the year 2015. They’re flying various missions with French and Russian pilots against an insurgency that has obtained a device called the “Trinity,” which has all the effects of a nuclear bomb but totally isn’t one, or so they mention in the game. 

     Surprise, surprise, it’s soon very obvious (whether the writers intended it to be or not) that there are traitors among the NATO forces, and given that it’s a team of Americans, Frenchmen and Russians, along with the popular trend of recent modern war game villains, I’ll give you one guess which nation the traitors belong to.

     So of course Bishop and the gang are called upon to sort this mess out using a wide variety of super-sonic flying death machines. Sounds good to me. 

     Something I feel obligated to say: a combat pilot usually only flies one type of aircraft. Sure, he can learn others and switch it up, but that’s a career choice, not something he does every time he goes on a mission like you will in Assault Horizon. 

     That’s not really a complaint, though, just an observation. Being allowed to choose my flavor of aircraft for each mission added some much-needed variety to the game. 

Visuals

     I have to give to Assault Horizon; it is very pretty. The cities are massive and modeled after real cities, so you’ll see various landmarks and have the opportunity to strafe them if you’re feeling cathartic. The sun gleams off the cockpit glass (assuming you choose first-person)

Gameplay

     Yeah, it’s alright. Not great by any stretch of the imagination, but not bad, either.

     I have to give Assault Horizon props because never at any point does it claim to be realistic. That’s good, because it certainly isn’t, by any means. 

     After listening to the “meh” story, I was given a choice of which aircraft I wanted to take into combat. Being a true patriot, I choose the classic F-16. On a side note to the developers, if you guys want to make a game where we fly various flavors of aircraft over various scenic locations, that’s all fine. I’m just not sure it needed the somewhat weak story to tie it together. 

     Anyway, right out of the gate, the first thing I noticed is that my awesome F-16 couldn’t barrel roll. Um, what? I was flummoxed. It wasn’t the plane, it was the controls. Yeah, no barrel rolls! Peppy would have a heart attack. 

     You can still invert, though, it’s just that you can’t do it by pitching left or right; you have to pitch up or down and perform a half-S turn. Pitching to the left or right will only tilt the craft to 90 degrees.

     It’s a petty complaint, I know, but I can’t perform half of the moves I learned from Top Gun without being able to invert, especially my favorite, the “greeting.” But whatever, the controls are still effective and efficient, so it’s a minor tick against the game. A bit strange that the helicopters can barrel roll, though, while the jets can’t.

     Since the above was a minor tick, here’s a major one: it’s just too easy (I’m sure fans of my Dark Souls review will appreciate me saying that). I crashed though the campaign with little difficulty. I died a couple times at the beginning while I was figuring out the controls, but once I learned about “Dogfight Mode,” the game might as well have rolled the credits for how challenging it was after that. 

     Dogfight Mode is an action sequence that you trigger by pressing the appropriate buttons when you get within 2,000 feet of an enemy with missile lock. Once triggered, the game will zoom in on your opponent and essentially maneuver the plane for you will you shoot the enemy pilot with 20mm cannons and radar-lock missiles. Yes, the game holds your hand like a kindergarten teacher. 

     And then there’s the wonderful variety of the game. As a fighter pilot, you’ll fly around and shoot missiles at planes. As a helicopter pilot, you’ll fly around and shoot missiles at tanks. As an A-10 pilot, you’ll fly around and shoot missiles at ships. Joy. 

     My point is that it gets very repetitive. About halfway through the campaign, I remember thinking that I would write here that the missions are too long.  Upon further thought, however, I realized that they weren’t really that long (about 25 minutes each), they just seem that way because the allure of taking down an enemy pilot is diminished when you’ve done it about twenty times. 

     Speaking of taking down enemy pilots twenty times, let’s talk about the whole “Ace” part of the game. For those of you who don’t know, a combat pilot is considered an Ace when he has shot down five aircraft in his career. Taking that into consideration, it can be safely said that Colonel William Bishop is the single greatest combat pilot in the universe.

     Through the course of the campaign I’m pretty sure I shot down about 300 aircraft, most of them being fighters, but some bombers as well. Here in Reality-burg, the most kills ever obtained by a single pilot is 81, achieved by the Red Baron himself, Manfred Von Richthofen. So in essence Bishop achieves three to four times as many kills in about half the time, making him Lord of the Skies.

     Part of the reason for this is because despite having about 10 teammates at your side at any given time, they don’t really do anything except buzz around and occasionally yell at you to hurry it up so they can go home and get drunk. You’ll be taking care of all the objectives and shooting down 90 percent of the enemies. 

     I don’t necessarily fault the game for that, though, because I can see why it was necessary. The game was already pretty short, so I can’t imagine the developers trying to incorporate a realistic number of enemies to kill. Unless, of course, said enemies were more challenging (and by more challenging I mean better at aerial combat, not just equipped with jets made out of diamond and to which the laws of physics bend like a plastic ruler), but now I’m dreaming. 

     I must say, though, that aside from the 300 kills I achieved as a fighter pilot, I was also tasked with taking down about six armored divisions by myself as a helicopter pilot. I think that’s a little much to ask of one pilot, especially when there are several more hovering above me snacking on Doritos while I do all the damn work. And yet it still wasn’t hard. 

    Still, I think the game does sometimes realize how much of a cakewalk it actually is. I say this because occasionally three or four MiGs will suddenly drop everything they’re doing and come after you (and only you) and ram about eight missiles up your empennage. It’s basically a shoddy attempt at an insta-kill. Still, it’s not a deal-breaker, because the game also offers a quick-time event dodge maneuver that will allow your plane to flip out for a moment before placing the enemy directly in front of you and automatically enters Dogfight Mode. 

     Speaking of missiles, you get about 250 per mission.  I'd like to know where I'm keeping them all. 

     There are also “bosses.” They’re played up as being more competent pilots, but I didn’t find that to be the case. I did find them more challenging, but it was because they possessed aircraft which could endure three times as many missile strikes and to which the laws of physics are humble servants. Not that I’m an expert in aeronautical engineering, but I’ve never seen a fighter that can stop on a dime in midair, roll backward into an invert, and then somehow end up behind its pursuer. 

Multiplayer

     I didn’t get to play much of it, to be honest. I just played the standard deathmatch, although there are capture-and-hold scenarios and a few others as well. And, just as I expected, most of the players online were far more competent than I, so I didn’t score many kills.     

     Just like the campaign, you can choose which aircraft you want to fly. In multiplayer, though, you can also earn a selection of paint jobs and call-signs by leveling up Modern Warfare style. Not that it matters that much, because gameplay is so frantic that you’ll only notice someone’s paint job when they kill you and the game zooms in on them to rub it in your face for a few seconds. 

     Once you enter a multiplayer match, you’re allowed to choose from one of four spawn points. You’ll then spend the next 10 minutes buzzing around with 16 other pilots like a swarm of angry hornets. 

Overall

     Despite all of the above, I have to admit that Assault Horizon definitely has its moments. There were a few occasions where I would lose myself in the intensity of the moment (usually broken when the dogfight autopilot would slam into a building and cause almost no damage). Like I said, though, it gets pretty repetitive, and it’s pretty easy.

     Keep in mind that I never expected Assault Horizon to rock my world, and indeed it falls short of doing that. All in all, it's a "meh," but at least it’s something a little different amongst the legions of first-person shooters that are coming about this fall, so give it a try.

     Another side note: it just didn't feel right without Goose back there.

     Investment Suggestion: Rent. I beat it in a few days. I don’t think the appeal of multi-player will last that long, so buying it seems like a waste of money. 

The above is only my opinion.  It just happens to be right.

Where to Purchase

Here's some great local places to pick up Assault Horizon: , , , and .

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