It’s a bit weird – since childhood I had a fascination with planes. Yet, I’ve never went into much of a “fandom” with the aircraft and barely ever played flight simulation games. But one of the games I did play and enjoy as a teen was Ace Combat 2 that I got in a bundle with the used PS1 my parents got me. I found it quite challenging, but it was an exciting experience that attempted to bring the cinematic and almost arcade racing approach to the flight simulation. It had a cool soundtrack, as titles from Namco (before they were merged with Bandai) of that era used to have. Since Ace Combat 2, I think the only flight sim I’ve played was Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X (which was neat) and that’s it.
But I’ve heard very good things about Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown and after years of debating with myself about if it’s even worth it for me to try it out, I did. And while it remains “not my thing”, I enjoyed it quite a bit.
From the start, it was very exciting to see the overall attitude of the game feel very close to what I’ve experienced with the second entry decades ago. With the main difference being an attempt to tell a more dramatic story, with characters who are affected by the same war that your player character fights in and bringing different perspectives to the whole experience. It’s not amazing and full of obvious tropes, but it does the job and has a few unexpected and welcome twists. But other than that, even though this game is built for modern systems on Unreal Engine 4, it evokes that good feeling of the classic titles with virtual 3D maps and audio-mostly tactical briefings and cool menu designs and exciting music playing. It’s hard to put it in words, what exactly is very “classic” about it, but it just feels like what I would’ve expected a sequel to Ace Combat 2 to be several decades later.
But the game is very smart about being as welcoming as it can for a new modern audience, with good tutorials for all the basics and two distinct control schemes. One that I mostly used that features much simplified turning and camera controls and one that is behaving far closer to how a real plane would. The second option allows for performing far crazier flight maneuvers, but you are also far more likely to just collide with the obstacles with way.
You might think that just being far enough from the ground solves the collisions issue, but Ace Combat 7 mission design is intentionally extremely cinematic and high stakes. So you will be often flying at low altitudes through canyons and mountains, or have to get lower to the ground to destroy ground defenses more efficiently. And you’ll be doing all that at very high speeds. So I just stuck with the standard controls and while that led to me getting lower ranks for missions that I could get otherwise, I still had a blast playing the game.
That said, it is still a challenging title. After giving you the basics and making you feel good through the first couple of missions, the things mission require will go crazier and crazier so expect restarting checkpoints or entire mission progress a lot, unless you’re used to the genre. It almost never frustrated me personally, because of how cool the presentation and mission design is. But it did lead me to not finishing the DLC missions that are quite cool, but also ramp up the difficulty quite a bit.
If you’ve never played these types of games, I feel like Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown is a very solid introduction. You should probably ignore the DLCs at first and only grab them if you like the game (and most of the plane DLCs are unnecessary for singleplayer campaign, in my opinion). And it is also a bit of a shame that the VR mode remained exclusive to PS4 release of the game and never got to PC. But nonetheless, I really liked playing this game and you should check it as well.