I’m such a completionist when it comes to video games that I hate not finishing any games that I start but I have to throw in the towel for this one. I bought this because I thought my flightstick was getting too little use and this is a well known game series that I’ve never dabbled in before. As it turned out, this is so much of an arcade game that the regular gamepad works better so I switched to it. I also very quickly discovered that this is the kind of game that really wants to frustrate the player and force you to make multiple attempts every mission just to find out what you need to do and what to bring. The missions are winnable, no doubt, once you know what to bring and you’re prepared for what’s going to happen, but this game is just too much of a pain for me to deal with.

I’m not even going to pretend I understand which I know has been developed through the many games of this franchise. It uses fictional countries in an original setting which is fair but that only adds to the confusion. Furthermore the player character ‘Trigger’ is silent so much of the narration is provided by Avril Mead, a civilian woman. You fight on behalf of the nation of Osea. The enemy Useans are attacking with the help of drone UAVs and manage to seize control of a space elevator that is under construction. They also gain control of flying drone carriers and the Osean President happened to be visiting the site at the time. Trigger participates in the missions to repel the Eruseans but they are outmatched by the superior numbers of the drones. During a mission to extract Harding, a stray missile destroys the president’s transport aircraft and Trigger is blamed. He is then sent to the prison where Avril is also being kept, for flying a civilian aircraft into a combat zone. From there, Trigger has to win his way back into the good graces of his government through sheer flying skill.

The fictional setting means that all sides can use American, European and Russian aircraft with wild abandon and there are all kinds of science-fiction toys. That’s fine. But there are so many things that make no sense at all. Avril can construct a flyable jet out of junk parts? The prison they are in is a decoy airbase to trick the Useans but it has a working runway with working planes and they’re even armed well enough to beat back an attack? Isn’t that just a regular airbase? I only made it about halfway through the game but I can’t tell what Avril even adds to the story with her narration. At least this means the game has you fighting against all kinds of crazy stuff: enemy planes, drones, tanks, even warships with an equally bewildering array of planes of your own. In addition to the regular missiles every plane has, you can also equip them with special weapons. These include things like unguided bombs and longer-ranged air-to-air missiles as you’d expect, but there are also more exotic fare like missiles that can take down multiple air targets at a time, long-ranged cruise missiles, experimental laser weapons and so on.

The types of missions are just as varied. In addition to dogfights with other planes and bombing ground targets, you can be asked to stay out of certain areas marked on your radar, to attack targets from within cloud cover, and even brave sandstorms and electrical storms. The flight model is so simple that it really feels like an arcade-style action game, it’s just that your character is a plane. You can dogfight but in general it feels unnecessary as you’ll almost always be taking down enemies with missiles instead of guns. Your plane can pull off impossibly tight turns and so can many of the enemy planes. You have so many of the standard missiles I can’t imagine anyone can run out and it seems that the missiles even regenerate if you really do run out. Later there are specific enemies that might be hard to catch with missiles so you need to predict their movements patterns and launch the missile at the right window of opportunity.

The mechanics are fine and it’s a good action game on paper but the missions often seem designed to be as frustrating as possible. The briefings are often wrong or misleading. Bring an A-10 to a mission because it looks like you’re mainly going to have to blow up ground targets. It all goes well at first and you’re merrily blowing things up then there’s a mission update and you need to take out some planes that just appeared. Sure, the A-10 is still armed with air-to-air missiles, but it’s almost impossible to dodge enemy missiles in that slow flying plane. This sort of thing happens again and again. You’d better read up on what to bring to the mission in advance. Even worse, it’s possible that you haven’t even unlocked what you need for a given mission. At least one mission absolutely requires some sort of long-ranged air-to-ground cruise missile and the plane that can equip you. Woe to you if you’ve already spent your resources without unlocking it. Then there are the times, the orders actively lie to you. They tell you to do something but for dramatic story purposes, it’s actually impossible and you’re really supposed to do something else instead. It’s just infuriating.

To add insult to injury, you have allies and wingmen all over the map but they’re usually completely useless. If the mission calls for you to hunt down twenty trucks hidden across the map, you’re the one who has to do it all. The others will fill the airwaves with chatter about how they’re going this way and that, and looking for targets, but they’ll never accomplish anything. Finally every mission has strict time limits. It’s so restrictive sometimes slow planes can’t complete a mission because it’s so hard to get from one mission objective to the next in time. The game really wants you to try and fail the missions over and over again, so you can memorize what types of enemies spawn and where so that you know where to go at the right time. There’s no save-anywhere either so if you die or fail you restart from the latest checkpoint and in many missions, that’s just restarting the whole mission from the beginning. I tried to persevere and stick it out but it’s just too frustrating for me.

It’s a pity because I rather like the idea of an arcade-style jet fighter game and the idea of mixing it up with a crazy variety of real world aircraft is kind of fun. But it seems to me that their combat model makes fighting even many enemies at a time too easy so they feel the need to give each mission some special gimmick. Combine that with the time limit, the useless of your squad mates, the high cost of unlocking the aircraft tree to get what you want and the obtuseness of what it is you’re actually meant to do, it stopped being fun for me very quickly. I wanted to like you Ace Combat but you’re just too annoying.