Welcome back to the Ace Combat Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be going over the game that kicked off my interest in this franchise, Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies! This game has a legendary reputation, and amongst the fandom it’s considered the first of a “holy trinity” of Ace Combat games released on PS2. For my own part, I love this game so much that it ranked quite highly on my list of all-time favourite games!
Suffice to say, I have very fond memories of Ace Combat 04, but I hadn’t really expected to like it when I first played it. My aunt would occasionally take my brothers and I out to Zellers and buy us some games. On this particular occasion, she bought us two or three games on sale. I can’t really remember what the others were, but she decided to get Ace Combat 04 without any input from us. I assume this is because of my family’s history with aviation – my grandfather was a flight instructor, and he took me out flying with him one time when I was very young. Despite that formative memory, I wasn’t really expecting much out of an “airplane game”, so it sat around on the shelf for weeks before I got bored enough to give it a spin. However, once I actually did try it out, I quickly found myself engrossed, to the point where I was going out of my way to S-rank every mission, shoot down every ace pilot, and 100% the game on New Game+ just for the sheer fun of it. It kind of parallels my experience with Ape Escape: one of those gifted games that you would never have considered buying yourself and weren’t expecting much from, but when you finally tried it, it blew your socks off. If nothing else, that’s a reminder that it’s good to branch out from your normal preferences every once in a while!
Anyway, all that to say: I hold Ace Combat 04 in extremely high regard. Despite that, it’s been two decades since I last played it. Does it still hold up in 2026? Read on to find out…
Somewhat depressingly, it’s hard to get Ace Combat 04 running in this day and age. My original copy was destroyed in a flood about a decade ago and there have been no ports or re-releases (it is speculated that this is due to licensing agreements with the real-world airline manufacturers). Current PS2 emulators can run it, but it requires a fairly powerful system run at full speed and even then it often has obnoxious graphical glitches, and the frame rate can suddenly tank at random. It’s basically unplayable on my Retroid Pocket 4 Pro (the system I usually like to use for game emulation), so I chose to use my Steam Deck instead. This worked fairly well, but there is some noticeable, momentary slowdown in certain missions (usually when there is a lot of cloud cover). It would be nice if Bandai Namco could provide a remaster or something so more people could experience this classic!
Love
- Story – Simply put, what catapults Ace Combat 04 into contention as one of the best games of all-time is its narrative. This splits into two key parts:
- First of all, there’s the macro-level narrative, presented through mission briefings. These give a broad overview of the war between Erusea and ISAF, with Erusea conquering nearly the entire continent and pushing the allies to the sea. It’s at this point that our pilot, call-sign Mobius 1, is put into service to fly defensive missions and give the allies a chance to regroup for a counter-attack. The reasoning for these missions is always stated and contextualized within the greater war effort, the tactical decisions actually make sense, and the game does a great job of feeding you hints of strategic objectives that will be featured in future missions. This sort of grounded, military realism reminds me of the early Halo games and why I enjoyed their narratives so much, especially in comparison to the sequels which became more like “action movies”. Some may consider this too impersonal and high-level to be engaging, but I for one love this approach – we are Mobius 1, and having them be this nameless, faceless hero just makes your single-handed turning of the war feel all the more legendary. Honestly, the macro-level narrative of Ace Combat 04 is very engaging and well-written, and is far better than people give it credit for. That said, the reason it gets overlooked is because…
- Then there’s the parallel narrative told from the perspective of a civilian boy whose town gets conquered early in the war. During the blitz, he witnesses an enemy pilot shoot down an ISAF plane, which crashes into his home, killing his entire family in the process. He falls in with the occupiers to try to find the man who killed his family… but when he finds him, an elite pilot with the call-sign Yellow 13, the pair form an unlikely kinship. The cutscenes that bring this story to life are beautiful, using hand-painted, still images which end up feeling far more evocative than if these scenes were fully-animated. The writing and performances here are fantastic, legitimately invoking the sort of feeling you’d get from hearing civilian accounts of World War II. These also provide a very contrasting and personal view of the ongoing war, and really builds anticipation for the moment when Yellow 13 and Mobius 1 will inevitably cross paths. It’s extremely emotional stuff, not the sort of thing you’d expect to experience from an arcade flight game!
- Game Feel – So while the story is definitely the element which pushes Ace Combat 04 into “legendary” status, it does so because the core gameplay has been refined to near-perfection. I really loved how fun Air Combat was to play, but Ace Combat 2 and 3 both had really obvious flaws in their gameplay engines which made air-to-ground or air-to-air combat frustrating and made them less-enjoyable experiences overall. Ace Combat 04, on the other hand, seems to have refined and perfected the way these games should play. Granted, this may be my bias showing here: this was my first Ace Combat game and the gold-standard by which I’ve measured all other flight games that have come after. With that in mind, I can only really speak for myself when I say that Ace Combat 04 is a hell of a lot of fun to play! The planes feel great to fly and maneuver, missiles lock-on at what feels like an appropriate range, distances and speeds feel appropriate, dogfights are fun and well-paced, and air-to-ground missions are equally-enjoyable! They’ve really pulled out all the stops to make sure that this game is as fun as possible.
- Graphics – While the textures in Ace Combat 04 aren’t exactly up to modern standards, this game was absolutely stunning to witness in its heyday. Hell, playing it again in 2025, I was still shocked by how good this game can look (especially in the mission “Deep Strike”, where the setting sun reflects brilliantly off of the solar panels if you hit just the right angle)! The screenshots I’ve posted here really do not do this game justice, you have to see it in-motion to really appreciate it.
- Sense of Scale – The prior three Ace Combat games were really limited by the technology of the PS1, which meant that you could only have so many enemies on-screen at once. However, the technological leap to the PS2 has clearly allowed Namco to run wild, as they turn these missions into full-on battlefields, with entire squadrons of allies fighting alongside you and significantly more enemy fighters in the air opposing you at the same time! The game also features a lot of ambient radio chatter from friendlies and enemies (both in the air and on the ground), with them reacting to your actions or just providing ambiance to really make this feel like a “real” conflict.
- Scoring System – I never really gave a shit about the end-of-level grade system in the prior Ace Combat games: I’d just complete the objectives and move on to the next mission. However, Ace Combat 04 subtly pushed me into caring by actually displaying in-game my current grade and the amount of points I’ll get for destroying the currently selected target. The in-game map also pushes you to care, marking higher-scoring targets in red, average-scoring targets in yellow, and lower-scoring targets in grey. I’ll tell you, as soon as you show me what I can get and how to get there, I was aiming for an S-rank in every goddamn mission (a feat which I’m proud to say that I mostly-accomplished in this playthrough)!
- Secondary Weapons – Ace Combat 04 wisely expands upon Ace Combat 3‘s secondary weapon system, taking it from an afterthought into a crucial aspect of the gameplay:
- First, and most importantly, these secondary weapons no longer replace your standard missiles, and instead are an alternate weapon you can swap between. Right away this makes this system infinitely more interesting, because no one was swapping the standard missiles for poorly-balanced garbage.
- Secondly, there are a ton of different secondary weapons. Each plane comes with one by default, and you can usually purchase one or two other options. This allows the developers to balance out each plane beyond pure stats, as a plane with a particular secondary weapon you like can make them much more useful to you. It also allows planes to be more specialized for air-to-air or air-to-ground combat in ways that feel tangible (for example, any plane that gets access to air-to-air or air-to-ground multi-targeting homing missiles instantly becomes an all-star).
- Thirdly, I like that you can essentially “build-craft” your plane to suit the type of combat you’re going to be getting into. I like that a lot of the planes’ default secondary weapon is the unguided bomb, which can make air-to-ground combat a bit easier. However, if you know you’re going to need to deal with aircraft, then you can probably buy a secondary weapon that will help with that.
- Soundtrack – Ace Combat 04‘s soundtrack slaps so hard! Seriously, every track just gets my blood pumping and gets me excited for the mission to come. Not much more I can say than that!
- Mission Structure – Missions in previous Ace Combat games typically took around five minutes to complete and would just have you blow up X number of targets to win. Missions in Ace Combat 04 have been refined somewhat – missions are now typically take least ten minutes to complete, and typically feature some sort of “twist” that happens mid-mission that ups the ante. This just makes Ace Combat 04‘s missions feel more substantial, and these twists can allow the narrative to develop and play out beyond the cutscenes between levels.
- I particularly love the levels where Stonehenge launches an attack on your position: these railguns fire rounds that create a massive, area-of-effect attack which destroys all planes flying over 2000ft. The canyon-run levels of previous Ace Combat games were kind of annoying, but when you are desperately forced into a canyon run mid-mission because an enemy super weapon is firing on your position? Sign me the fuck up, son!
Mixed
- Your Plane Can Go Really Slow – So I’m really mixed on this, to the point where I’m not sure I’d consider it a “love” or a “hate” at all: you can decelerate your plane to a point that feels too slow, especially if you’ve played the prior three Ace Combat games. If your plane went this slow in those games, you’d stall for sure. It makes lining up a shot feel really easy, but it also makes the game feel very arcadey, in spite of the game’s effort for authenticity elsewhere. That said… stalling all the time and crashing into things is annoying, so the game is certainly more fun for this inclusion.
- That said, the in-game speedometer will show that you’re still going about 130mph before you stall, which is apparently within the stall-range of a real-life jet, so it may just be the vast scales making this “look” wrong when it actually isn’t. I’m also writing this literally a day after witnessing multiple commercial airliners flying over my head at airspeeds slower than the planes in Ace Combat 04, so maybe I just don’t know shit about how planes “should” work.
Hate
- Mid-Mission Rearming – Planes in Ace Combat 04 are rocking around sixty missiles (whereas real planes might carry a couple dozen at most). In spite of this, the devs decided to add some realism by forcing you to go back to base to rearm, because you will not have enough missiles on you to accomplish the mission objectives. This happens in probably sixty percent of the missions, causing you to burn a couple minutes every time it happens. Why is this even a feature…? Just give me the appropriate number of missiles so I can blow shit up with abandon!
- SAMs – SAMs (Surface-to-Air Missiles) were pretty pathetic in the previous Ace Combat games, often nothing more than smoking craters long before posing a threat to you. However, in Ace Combat 04, SAMs now have the exact same lock-on range as you do. This means that, within a couple seconds of approaching one, they will lock-on and fire at you. If you’re not paying attention to this (which you probably aren’t, because you are focused on/chasing some other nearby, high-value target), then you will probably get fucked up and shot down in short order, because these bastards are incessant. You quickly come to learn that you need to deal with the SAMs first if you want to survive. This is honestly more of an “annoying thing” rather than a full-on “hate” (especially because nearly every subsequent Ace Combat game goes back to making SAMs a pathetic joke), but hearing the incoming missile alarm constantly going off can be very irritating.
Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies is about as damn-near perfect as video games come. In fact, I may have under-estimated how good the game was in my Top 100 Best Games list: when I update it in a few years, expect to see it much higher. I don’t know what more else I can say: play the goddamn game, it’s a masterpiece!
If you liked this article…
I hate ads. You hate ads. In order to stop polluting my site with obtrusive and annoying ads, I’ve elected to turn them off on IC2S. That said, writing still takes time and effort. If you enjoyed what you read here today and want to give a token of appreciation, I’ve set up a tip jar. Feel free to donate if you feel compelled to and I hope you enjoyed the article! 🙂
About the Author
