For every fun mission where you blow up a base or take down skilled enemy pilots, who really can throw you for a loop (literally), there’s something far less appealing around the corner, including a wide variety of escort missions and at least three levels with slow, winding stealth sections.
What’s frustrating is that in general, developer Project Aces seems dead-set on playing against Ace Combat 7’s strengths in its campaign design rather than emphasizing them. Weather also adds mechanical challenges that make these events feel like a real hazard rather than just window dressing: High winds can change your heading and lightning can strike you, disabling your weapons when you need them most. There’s impressive attention to detail in these conditions - your cockpit glistens with water when you fly through rain and the lighting changes as you fly through clouds of sand. Through the 10 to 15-hour campaign you’ll navigate thunderstorms, sandstorms, fog, and more. “As was a trend among many 2018 games like Forza Horizon 4 and Just Cause 4, the signature feature of Ace Combat 7 (which was at one point intended to come out last year) is an emphasis on detailed weather conditions. You will learn by doing - by failing, crashing, and getting shot down. It’s still possible to pick up the controls and have a decent time swatting planes out of the sky, especially if you’ve played other Ace Combat games, but it’s definitely a struggle to figure out the ins and outs. And yet, it expects us to jump back in like no time has passed.
Even fans who have followed the series and played every game are likely out of practice. It has been almost five years since the last Ace Combat game, Infinity, and 12 years since Ace Combat 6. The idea that anyone will just pick up this game and know everything they need to do, even if it plays identically to past Ace Combats, is ludicrous.
Even on easy, the difficulty meant for those “who are new to the Ace Combat series,” there are a just few text prompts in the opening missions telling you how to brake, accelerate, use your missiles, etc.
Many mechanics, such as using bombs to attack ground targets, get no instructions at all, even when they’re incorporated into missions. Whether you’re a new novice player or an old fan returning and looking to take your piloting skills to the next level, there is no training mode and no advanced tutorials. As someone who’s played Ace Combat games before, I came in with some of that knowledge but it still felt like I had a lot to learn.For that reason, I was baffled by the fact that Ace Combat 7 offers little to no help. Figuring out tilting your nose up can slow your forward movement down without losing speed, integrating advanced pitch and yaw controls to tighten up your turns, or simply fine-tuning your sense of the ideal angle from which to approach an enemy fighter to get a quick, decisive shot at them take practice and knowhow.
You can pick it up and play at a basic level, but dogfighting in Ace Combat is, and has always been, surprisingly complex: there are tricks and advanced maneuvers to figure out using the advanced turning controls that bring lots of nuance to the combat. All that strategy flies out the window as you focus solely on keeping up with the jet in your sights and lining up that perfect missile lock. “There are moments, particularly when chasing down with a tricky opponent, when your reflexes are put to the test.