Ace Combat: Assault Horizon – Enhanced Edition was originally released in 2011 for consoles and it only took Namco two years to port it to PC. I already played the game for a short while after I bought it – it happens – and only remember being unimpressed and slightly disappointed. I now relived those emotions. The game looks like a really (really!) stupid action movie from the 80s or early 90s, which I regard as a thing of beauty, but it just doesn’t deliver. There’s not even a volley ball scene with pilots all oiled up in sunscreen.
The tutorial is fun. You shoot rockets at planes and the results are beautiful, but as soon as you realize, that you have to engage half the enemies in ‘dog fight mode’, it becomes clear how extremely dumbed down the controls are. It’s a really basic arcade game. This comes even more apparent in the second mission, which lets you play as a door gunner of a helicopter just pointing the mouse at everything that moves.
Speaking of controls – why is this game easier to play with a keyboard than with a controller? Who cares! It got repetitive with Mission 3 and I consider this ‘done’. Is there something similar out their, that feels less like an arcade game and takes a more realistic approach, without being a hardcore simulation? That’s what I want.
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