Ace Combat 6: Initial Impressions
![ace-combat6[1].jpg](http://lowspec.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/ace-combat6%5B1%5D.jpg)
Ace Combat 6 has beautiful airplanes, in beautiful skies, flying over beautiful landscapes, making beautiful explosions. It’s about as close to photorealistic as games get. The illusion only fades in those rare moments when I drop below radar far enough to buzz the treetops and the landscape textures start to blotch out.
It’s like playing the fighter jet scenes from Top Gun, except there are a lot more planes in the air and a lot more targets on the ground. Missions are multi-tiered affairs that involve sprawling land, sea, and air battles involving dozens of AI-controlled units. Scenarios involve shooting down incoming waves of bombers, scrambling to provide air support for vehicle convoys, and more. Sometimes it’s difficult to grasp the objective, but so far I seem to do just fine as long as I keep an eye on my radar and track down and destroy anything that looks like an enemy.
The visuals are worthy of a top-tier flight sim, but the gameplay is straight-up arcade. I’m 2/3 of the way through the missions so far, playing on the “normal” difficulty, and I’m surprised how easy it is to avoid enemy fire. I haven’t been shot down once, and I’ve only crashed twice. The planes control like a dream. They also carry impossibly huge quantities of ammunition, although some missions are lengthy enough that I’ve had to land to reload.
As long as I’m airborne, the game’s great fun, even if it is a little repetitive. The constant, poorly voice-acted radio chatter is plenty campy, but it doesn’t detract from the combat. Instead, it’s the mission briefings and story that bring the experience down. I rarely skip cutscenes, even if they’re awful, but Ace Combat 6’s are so lengthy, boring, and just plain dumb that after the first few interludes I couldn’t take it anymore. Why the developers decided to intersperse intense aerial combat with such endless, sentimental, interminable dreck is beyond me. If the game hadn’t allowed me to skip the story sequences, I probably would have quit after the third mission. They’re that bad.
I haven’t checked out the multiplayer yet. I’ll probably take it for a spin in the near future. The co-op missions have me particularly intrigued.