Love/Hate: Ace Combat 6 – Fires of Liberation (2007)

Welcome back to the Ace Combat Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’re heading to the Xbox 360 for Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation! That’s right: with the rough launch of the PS3, Bandai Namco (who had amalgamated in 2006) felt that the Xbox 360 was the future and so they jumped ship to new hardware. Unfortunately for them, history went on to show that this was a disastrous move, with Ace Combat 6 netting the lowest sales figures in the entire franchise (excluding handheld entries), since the series’ audience were typically PlayStation gamers. As a result, this game is one that has often been overlooked, as it was never ported to any other consoles. Since starting this series playthrough, I’ve been intrigued to see what secrets it has in store. Did the high quality bar of the PS2 trilogy continue, or was this there a reason that this game marked the start of Ace Combat‘s decline in relevance? Read on to find out…

Despite never being ported, Ace Combat 6 is, thankfully, pretty easy to play today thanks to Xbox’s backward compatibility program. I snagged a copy of the game for less than $15, popped it into my Xbox One and, after a reasonably short download, was playing the game upscaled and running flawlessly in 2026! I’m extremely leery about the DRM aspect of the Xbox backwards compatibility program, the somewhat-limited game selection, and the long-term security of my collection, but damn does it feel good to just be able to play old games reliably like this!

Love

• Epic Scale & Scope – Ace Combat 6 features some insanely huge battles. For example, the game’s first mission has over one hundred units per side battling it out… and that’s far from the largest battle you’ll engage in. By the fourth mission, you’re facing off against two hundred enemies. Then, only one mission later, you’re facing three hundred! By the time you hit the game’s big, climactic siege of Gracemeria, you’ll have over four hundred enemies you can engage (and that’s not even mentioning allied troops, which puts total, independently-acting units in this battle well over five or six hundred). Suffice to say, there are single missions in this game which have more enemy units than entire previous Ace Combat games would muster across their total runtimes! You’re in a target-rich environment, constantly blowing things up as contrails fill the sky and ground forces launch barrages of gun and artillery fire. Ace Combat 6 is operating on a level of true spectacle that few games even attempt to go for, which makes the game feel truly epic to witness.
• Replay System – Nearly every Ace Combat game has had a replay system, and while they’re neat, they rarely were worth mentioning as a highlight of the game. However, given Ace Combat 6‘s grand spectacle, combined with some awesome improvements to the replay system, this game’s replays end up being a legitimate post-mission treat. In addition to being able to change the camera angles (of which several new and dynamic angles have been added!), you now can use the analog sticks to dynamically zoom the camera, turn in-game radio chatter on/off, hold the left trigger to enter slo-mo, hold the right trigger to fast forward to the good bits, and you can save your replays to show off. I mean… just look at all the screenshots I took for this article: I had a ton of fun rewatching my performances and getting really cool shots throughout my playthrough. With a capture card and a bit of creativity, you could very easily make an incredible gameplay montage, or even put together a pulse-pounding machinima film using little more than this creative suite. If nothing else, it’s really fun to rewatch the highlights of your mission from a cinematic angle!
• High-G Turns – Perhaps the best gameplay innovation Ace Combat 6 brings to the table is the new “high-G turns” mechanic. If you hold down both triggers, this causes your plane to enter an incredibly tight turn. While it’s perhaps not the most realistic feature, it has a lot of practical uses: allowing you to get behind an evading enemy, avoid incoming missiles, avoid ground collisions (which it did for me on more than one butt-clenching occasion), or just make a quick turn when you’re in a hurry. It feels balanced as well, since you lose a ton of speed performing the maneuver, swiftly leading to a stall if used overzealously. Hell, once you get skilled enough with the feature, the dramatic speed loss ends up being a net benefit, since you can go from a top speed strafing run and then quickly turn around to get a second pass in.
• Operations – Given the sheer size of Ace Combat 6‘s battles, the developers have introduced a new system to try to help organize the chaos a little bit: operations. These are kind of like the “hot zones” in Ace Combat 04, where you’ve got a bunch of concentrated clusters of enemies to focus your attention, although operations are more structured and dynamic in comparison. Each operation will have enemies and allies battling it out, destroying each others’ forces and even destroying mission objectives if they have enough firepower on their side. You can provide air support to turn the tide so your allies win the operation. Conversely, if you ignore any particular operation, then allied forces will eventually be defeated and the operation will be lost. Once the operation’s objective is completed, the remaining allied forces will lend you aid throughout the rest of the battle. Given the size and scale of these battles, there can be several operations active at once: there will usually be at least three to choose between at the start of the mission, but there are some battles where you need to juggle upwards of six different operations at once. Thankfully, you only need to complete two thirds of the operations to complete the mission, which makes them a bit more manageable. This also helps keep things fresh for replays or different approaches if you get stuck on a particular operation.
• Mid-mission Checkpoints – Given the huge scale of Ace Combat 6‘s levels, they tend to run longer than any previous Ace Combat game (where you would typically expect to complete a minute in anywhere from a couple minutes to maybe fifteen minutes at the most). As a result, Project Aces have thankfully implemented a mid-mission checkpoint system which usually triggers after the completion of an operation or some other major objective. This is one of those things you’d think would be a bare-minimum quality-of-life consideration, but I’m thankful that they did implement this to save on some unnecessary frustration and keep you from playing with excessive caution.

Mixed

• Power Fantasy – Ace Combat 6 is by far the most empowering game in the entire franchise… for better or worse. Let me put it this way: your starter plane in this game is the F-16 (which is a mid-game unlock in any other Ace Combat title) and it comes equipped with multi-warhead homing missiles (the best anti-air weapon) by default as your secondary weapon! Right out the gate, you are already very well-equipped to annihilate anything you come across, but this is barely scratching the surface of how ridiculously overpowered you are in Ace Combat 6. Your plane carries two or three times as many missiles and secondary weapons as in previous games, and most of the secondary weapons have gotten huge buffs in effectiveness. As if that wasn’t enough, your missiles often one-shot enemy planes and have more effective tracking! Oh, and your machine guns will one-shot nearly every enemy within gun range (including heavily armoured planes which would take three or more missiles to down in previous games)! But wait, there’s more! Once you’ve completed enough objectives, you’ll fill a bar which allows you to call in an “Allied Attack”, causing every ally in the vicinity to rain a hail of missiles down on all on-screen enemies. This usually results in severe devastation for the enemy forces, and you can call these Allied Attacks in pretty regularly once you’ve completed at least one operation. Individually, these are all really cool features, but added all together, it really kills any difficulty, skill, or strategy that was inherent to Ace Combat‘s core gameplay systems. You’re just flying around, blowing up everything you see, and occasionally checking to make sure you’re not missing any of the mission objectives. It also means that, when the game wants to feel difficult, it has to throw some utter bullshit at you to make you feel at all challenged.
• The Story – Ever since Ace Combat 3 put an emphasis on storytelling, we’ve had some real ups and downs with this series. Unfortunately, Ace Combat 6 has the worst story of any mainline Ace Combat game since 3, in my opinion.
  • On the one hand, we’ve got the usual macro-level storytelling. You play as Gryphus 1 (aka, Talisman) as your country of Emmeria is invaded by Estovakia. You can imagine what happens: you’re pushed to the brink, but then fight back, destroy the enemy’s super weapons, and retake your country. Aside from having the first mission take place during the initial invasion, there’s not really anything here that you haven’t seen before. This part of the narrative is mediocre, but serviceable.
  • Unfortunately, it’s the civilian-level narrative where the game really drops the ball. This narrative follows a few different characters who find themselves caught up in the war: in particular, a mother and a former Estovakian pilot turned intelligence officer. It’s trying to hit the same level of emotional resonance as Ace Combat 04‘s much-lauded civilian storyline, but it just doesn’t work very well due to the clash between the serious tone and overwrought writing. It tries to tell this weighty, anti-war narrative through a stream-of-conscious narration, but it ends up feeling either dull or melodramatic. The most notorious bit of writing is the “dance with the angels” motif that the Emmerian forces use as a rallying cry. I’d heard the Ace Combat fandom memeing on this phrase, but having played the game, I get why they do: it is way overused throughout the game, to the point of being rendered meaningless. I was really down on this side of the narrative for most of the game, but by the time we got the the game’s final act, I just kind of accepted it and went with it. It never gets “good” or even particularly entertaining like Ace Combat 5‘s back half did, but I didn’t hate it by the end… so that’s something, I guess?
  • On a related note, Ace Combat 6‘s civilian storyline uses in-engine cutscenes to tell its story. Once again, I mourn the loss of hand-painted still images; part of the reason this story doesn’t work as well is because the character models aren’t that great at conveying emotion, so the poor writing and narration have to do the heavy lifting, which they are not suited for at all.
• Gracemeria – The city of Gracemeria makes for a really cool setting for an Ace Combat battle. It’s a very large, modern city with all sorts of tall buildings, a large suspension bridge, and harbour. It helps make the opening sequence so spectacular to witness, being such a cool, familiar, and evocative setting for an epic air battle. You spend most of the game getting hyped up to return to Gracemeria to liberate it and, while there’s a sense that the devs are recycling some assets with this return, you don’t really care. You’ve been so excited to get back, so it feels totally earned. However, did they need to bring it back again for a third time immediately after the liberation? Honestly, by that point it starts to feel like Project Aces are taking the piss. This game only has fifteen missions, so you’re spending a full twenty percent of this game fighting over this one location!

Hate

• Too Chaotic For Its Own Good – As cool as Ace Combat 6‘s epic scope is, the decision to prioritize spectacle above all else has had some major knock-on effects on the overall playability of the game. We already touched on this with my mixed feelings on the power fantasy aspects of the game, but they were kind of necessary to be able to cut through the sheer number of enemies you’re faced with. However, this brings us to the real issue that this game’s size and scope presents: Ace Combat 6 is just way too chaotic for its own good. It is very difficult to keep track of objectives, the various targets in-play, and trying to figure out what is important and what isn’t at any given moment. Ace Combat 6 feels like the Ninja Gaiden II of air combat games: it’s got the same sort of “push the hardware to its limits with as many on-screen enemies as possible, playability be damned” design philosophy.
  • To expand on this, dogfights are basically impossible to keep track of. You’ve got dozens of planes flying all around you at any given time. You can try to take down one plane at a time, but this will typically result in several other planes getting onto your tail and harassing you, forcing you to break off or constantly switch targets. You end up having to fire off multi-homing missiles and/or calling in allied attacks just to decimate everything in an efficient manner. God help you if you get into a dogfight and have to handle it the old-fashioned way (just using your standard missiles), because it’ll take you forever to whittle them down enough to be manageable.
  • As bad as dogfights can be, ground missions can be even worse. The game’s fifth mission, “Anea Landing”, really made this clear to me. There are a ton of ground targets throughout this mission… and very few of them actually do anything more than clutter your screen. I was focused on the operation to clear a path for our naval units, so I had to destroy a bunch of howitzers that were on oil rigs and then blow up artillery on the beach. The problem is that all of these targets are surrounded by dozens of densely-clustered optional targets which do not matter in the slightest: they don’t pose a threat and they don’t have any effect on mission completion. They feel like they’re just there to stop you from being able to target the things that are actually important: enemy ships, artillery, and the SAMs that are protecting them. I would fly over mission objectives and immediately get attacked by several SAMs, but because there was so much worthless visual clutter, I could not figure out where they were attacking me from so I could do anything about it. The game severely needs to either cut down on the clutter, or provide a system for easier targeting of high-priority enemies.
  • Unfortunately, this also means that multi-homing ground missiles (the premiere ground-attack secondary weapon in prior Ace Combat games) are borderline-fucking worthless in Ace Combat 6, because they will inevitably lock on to some unimportant optional target, wasting a lot of your missiles for no real gain. I found cluster bombs and the anti-ship missile to be much more effective against ground targets, because they would wipe out the thing I want destroyed, plus everything else in its postal code in one shot.
• ESM – Another one of Ace Combat 6‘s new additions that erodes these games’ core skill tests, ESM is a new short-ranged radar system that makes all missiles in its vicinity stronger and more effective at tracking enemies. It can be a very potent tool to shoot down enemies efficiently, but I would trade it away in a heartbeat if it meant I didn’t have to deal with enemies using their own ESM systems. As the game goes on, enemy forces will start deploying these things all over the place, which forces you to immediately locate and destroy them, unless you want to have a half dozen missiles on your tail at all times. Oh, speaking of which…
• Missile Incoming – Building off of the previous two points, you are going to be hearing the incoming missile alert all the goddamn time in this game. What is perhaps most annoying about this is that it will go off even if you’re clearly not in any actual danger of getting hit: enemies will sometimes fire a missile in your general direction and you’ll turn in such a way that it could never keep up with you, but until it gives up, that alert is gonna keep blaring. In the latter-half of the game you get hounded by SAMs, putting them at their most annoying since Ace Combat 04. However, my complaints about them in that game were mostly out of minor annoyance: I understood that they were there to give me something to deal with before I went for the objectives they were defending. At the end of the day, they felt like a fair challenge. In Ace Combat 6 though, due to all the chaos, the sheer number of SAMs they’ve got all over the place, plus ESM systems making them even more effective, I just cannot keep up with it all. In the last few levels, you end up having to prioritize 1) ESM, 2) SAMs, 3) objectives, all while flying at high-speed for maximum maneuverability, or you will be shot down in short order.
  • Oh and it’s not just the SAMs either: you’ll often have a couple enemy planes on your tail harassing you at all times. I rarely could manage to put any focus on shooting them down, so I just had to try to outmaneuver them most of the time.
  • One last point about missiles worth mentioning: if you get hit, your plane will be pushed hard from the impact. On multiple occasions, a single SAM hit at low altitude pushed me directly into terrain, causing an instant death.
  • Anyway, this is kind of what I was getting at earlier about difficulty: the game makes you so overpowered that it has to overwhelm you or pull off some sort of bullshit to make it “feel” harder. Even then, this game isn’t particularly difficult, even by Ace Combat standards, but it may just be the most annoying: having to constantly fly at top speed to avoid all the super-homing missiles coming at you, frantically trying to figure out where the enemy radar systems and SAMs are isn’t exactly fun or exciting when you’re subjected to it constantly.
• Mission Targets Feel… Arbitrary? – As I mentioned earlier, you need to destroy all designated targets in order to complete an operation. While each operation will have several optional targets that you can destroy, as soon as the designated targets are destroyed, all optional targets will be automatically neutralized. This feels… completely arbitrary? I mean, I guess it cuts through some of the chaos if you just focus on the targets marked as mission-critical on your map, but even this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Why are some random planes mission-critical to destroy, while others aren’t? Not to mention that this just renders most of the on-screen enemies as nothing more than an annoyance which are blocking you from being able to efficiently destroy the stuff that the game considers actually important. Once you realize this, it goes back to the issue with Ace Combat 3‘s mission design: if only some targets actually matter, why would you waste your time on non-essential targets?
• The A-10A… and Design Knock-On Effects – I love the A-10A in every previous Ace Combat games. This thing is always an early-game unlock, but I would use it pretty regularly throughout my playthroughs, because it is heavily specialized for air-to-ground missions: nothing even comes close to rivalling it. Hell, it was probably my second-most used plane in Ace Combat 04; I’d be using it into the late game whenever an heavily air-to-ground-centric mission came up. As a result, it pains me to say that the A-10A felt fucking worthless in Ace Combat 6. I deployed with it in the aforementioned “Anea Landing” mission and, after several failed attempts, just gave up on it and deployed with a more well-rounded multirole fighter. Unfortunately, I think this is illustrative to yet another major issue of Ace Combat 6‘s design philosophy: a lot of the variety and personalization of prior Ace Combat games gets lost in the shuffle. Due to the sheer number of enemies you need to deal with in most missions, you end up needing to take a multirole fighter with strong anti-ground capabilities to do well in this game. You need to be fast to avoid enemy missiles, so a slower plane like the A-10A feels terrible to use, even with its armour that’s supposed to offset this (it sure as hell did not feel much sturdier to me). Then, since most missions are primarily against ground targets, you need to take a special weapon to clear these out efficiently since they tend to be so clustered and surrounded by SAMs. Anti-air capabilities are pretty much an afterthought, because a single, well-placed Allied Attack will reliably kill nearly every enemy plane you come across. If you’re not running this particular kind of set-up (outside of the handful of missions where you are primarily facing enemy air units), then you’re going to struggle mightily… which kind of sucks. In previous Ace Combat games, you felt like you could complete pretty much any mission with pretty much any plane if you wanted to without too much frustration, but that’s simply not the case here.
• Gun/Comms Camera – With the move to widescreen and HD, Ace Combat suddenly found itself with a bunch of new screen real estate… so why not fill it with unnecessary crap! Ace Combat 6 introduces the “gun camera” and the “comms camera”, which show you a zoomed in visual of what you’re currently targeting, and a visual of whoever’s talking to you right now, respectively. While it’s kind of cool to see an enemy ground target or airplane right as you blast them to hell, I turned both of these setting off very quickly and never missed their presence. They make no sense from an immersion perspective (who the hell is operating this camera feed…?), take up way too much space on the screen (which just clutters your view even more), and are ultimately kind of pointless. What really pushes this into a genuine “hate” for me though is that, if you forget to turn one of these settings off, you can’t do so when you’ve deployed on a mission. You can only do so from the main menu or mission briefing screen, which means you either deal with it for the duration of the mission (and hope you remember to turn it off afterwards), or you quit back to the menu to turn it off and then have to redeploy again. Either way: annoying!!!

While Ace Combat 6 is really trying to be a “next-gen” Ace Combat game and has a spectacular, breath-taking scope to it, it really is a step down from the PS2 titles all-round. Unfortunately, the mediocre narrative, combined with the all-encompassing focus on spectacle, which erodes away the series’ core challenge and gameplay, makes Ace Combat 6 feel messy and less fun to play overall. Granted, that spectacle does allow the game to stand out, and when it is firing on all cylinders it provides an Ace Combat experience unlike any other, but it’s way too messy and inconsistent for me to call it a success.

About the Author

Barloq

Administrator

Writer, blogger, father. Blogging since 2012, writing my whole life. Was blessed by the chupacabra and the guardian shepherd.

Visit Website View All Posts