Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Hands-On Preview (Xbox 360)

From the moment you take control, Ace Combat: Assault Horizon is unmistakeably an Ace Combat ga–

Actually, hold on.

Start… Options… Control Mode –> Original. Click in right thumbstick to go into first-person. Right; let’s start again.

After a couple of minutes flitting through menus to restore the less-arcadey controls of the previous games, Ace Combat: Assault Horizon is unmistakeably an Ace Combat game. For the uninitiated, Ace Combat is a series of arcade flight sims which flirt with realism but ultimately forego it in favour of making you feel like, well, an ace. Sure, the planes are licensed, and (optionally) you can use the more realistic pitch and roll flight controls, but your plane is also stuffed with an impossible number of missiles and this isn’t the sort of game where you’ll be  taking readings from the cockpit and flicking switches left right and centre.

In previous games, it's rare that you'd get this close.

One of the problems that dogfighting sims have always had is that it’s sometimes difficult to feel close to the action. Your target is more often than not an indistinct speck in the distance and you’re just trying to keep it in your sights long enough to get a missile tone. Ace Combat: Assault Horizon sets out to fix this problem, and the results are promising, if inconclusive in the short time I had with it.

If you manage to close in on a target and press both bumper buttons, the game switches to Dogfight Mode, a whole new type of gameplay for the series. In this mode you are locked onto the enemy’s tail and kept close, and you are tasked with fine-tuning the aim in order to get off shots and lock missiles. It’s easier said than done, and the targets can be slippery devils even in this mode.

In fact, it was a lot quicker most of the time to stay out of Dogfight Mode and fire off a pair of missiles at a distance, just as I would have done in previous games. Nevertheless it was so much more exciting to get up close and personal that more often than not I found myself switching to Dogfight Mode for the fun of it; for the first time in an Ace Combat game I actually wanted to use the machine guns. Moreover, it provided a way to break out of the lengthy, repetitive dogfights in those games where some of the more difficult targets could slip from your sights repeatedly, resulting in having to spin wildly for minutes at a time in the hope of a lucky shot.

Rather cleverly, Dogfight Mode also allows for moments of excitement that just wouldn’t have been possible in previous games in the series. When you switch into it, the plane you are chasing leads you off through a scripted route, often taking you on an exciting pursuit around buildings and bridges with explosions and falling debris. It would be utter madness to attempt to chase a plane in this manner if the controls were left entirely in your hands, and Project Aces have shrewdly gambled that players would be willing to give up complete control in exchange for more exciting combat.

Whether this gamble will continue to pay off for the duration of the game remains to be seen. Traditionally, Ace Combat games have provided variety with air-to-ground based missions and upped the ante by pitching you against ridiculously powerful super-planes or unlikely weapons. The part I played was pure dogfighting and so I can’t say whether the game is as engaging when playing other types of missions.

You'll be seeing this sort of thing a lot.

I also didn’t get very much of a sense of how the story is presented, except for a well-produced in-engine cutscene at the end of the mission. While many of the past games have been set on fictional continents, Ace Combat: Assault Horizon has a real world setting, although mention of super weapons in story teasers released so far give no reason to suppose that the game will be scaling back on the over-the-top threats of its predecessors.

If you like the way that the Ace Combat series let you pretend you were playing a realistic flight sim when in fact you are doing no such thing, some of the further concessions towards arcade-style gameplay threaten to irritate. I had to laugh when I nosedived into the ground at one point and bounced off with hardly a scratch (a moment bizarre enough that I thought perhaps this was only in the preview build I was playing). If, on the other hand, you’re seeking opportunities to look and feel awesome as you fly a fighter through a plethora of explosions, Ace Combat: Assault Horizon seems like it’ll be ever so eager to please.

Ace Combat: Assault Horizon will be out on October 11th in North America and the 14th in Europe. Many thanks to the fine folk at Bamco Nan Namco Bandai Partners for letting us drop by to play it.