Namco's Ace Combat flight shooter series is back and this time it's ... a first-person shooter?
Namco has had a great idea with Assault Horizon, the latest title in the long-running Ace Combat series. Turn it into a first-person shooter.
Of course, it's still about flying billion-dollar jets above intricately detailed cities, taking down bogeys. But now the intricacies of flight control have been slashed, and there's a new emphasis on close-quarters combat. The world has clearly been falling out of love with flight sim shooters for years ? so creating Call of Duty in the stratosphere seems like a good idea.
At the controls of an F-22 swooping above Miami, it all makes sense. The analogue sticks let me look around and "steer", while I can also use the shoulder buttons if a want to "yaw" it up a bit. I really don't. The triggers handle acceleration and deceleration, while weapons are on the fire buttons. I have a machine gun, a standard missile, and a mere handful of multiple missiles that will target up to four enemy craft simultaneously. A sort of mid-air smart bomb.
I don't really know who I'm fighting, something about insurgents developing a powerful bomb as part of a fictional global uprising. There's a Russian pilot named Andrei Markov at the centre of it all. He's a mercenary and he has drawn shark's teeth on the nose of his plane to communicate the fact that he's not to be messed about with. None of this matters. What matters is that the skies above Miami are filled with enemy craft, swooping over the beach, and I have to shoot them down.
The key new innovation here is the dogfight (or "close-range assault" mode. When a plane is in your reticule, you can press the two shoulder buttons to go into a sort of iron sight over-the-shoulder view, which also zooms in on your target, making it easier to strafe them with gunfire and missiles.
The idea is to get away from that whole "shooting at distant dots" thing that people hate about air combat sims. In this view, the camera shakes, the action is fast and close; it's as if Marcus Fenix has donned a jet pack. Propeller heads will probably find it distracting and inauthentic, and weirdly, it reminds me of Namco's forgotten 1995 footie game, J-League Prime Goal EX, in which the camera would adopt a behind-the-shoulder view for every tackle, allowing players to try to outsmart each other in a quick QTE-style mini-game.
Here though, the trick works quite nicely, and adds an exhilarating sense of physical danger to the shoot-outs. Namco has also added zonal damage, so you can take out an enemy craft's tail or landing gear ? which of course, mimics the contextual damage employed in most first-person shooters. And when a plane is taken out in this mode there's a mammoth explosion that sprays your screen with black engine oil ? the mechanical blood of your nose-diving victim.
At the same time, enemies are able to lock on to your craft in the same way, opening up a counter-manoeuvres mini-game requiring you to change speed and direction very quickly. Damage is represented as, yes, a red haze around the edges of the screen, in yet another sly nod to the FPS genre. It's so much more intense than getting a little beeping warning light telling you that a missile is hurtling toward your back-end.
The game also looks impressively sharp, with detailed scenery pulled from satellite data. The Dubai map is spectacular, capturing every one of those looming hubristic skyscrapers. Some missions require the player to fly low over the cityscape on bombing runs, and the camera zooms in greedily on particularly impressive explosions.
There are also helicopter-based missions, in which ground troops and armoured vehicles need to be taken out. The American military advised on the technical accuracy of all this. I'm sure Ace Combat: Assault Horizon is being installed into every air force recruitment centre in the country.
? Ace Combat: Assault Horizon is released on Xbox 360 and PS3 on 14 October. A European limited edition of the game comes with steel case, soundtrack CD, a notebook signed by the development team and a code to download exclusive aircraft
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2011/may/19/ace-combat-assault-horizon-preview
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