Love/Hate: Ace Combat 2 (1997)

Welcome back to the Ace Combat Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be going over Ace Combat 2, the first sequel released on the PS1. After the success of Air Combat, Namco wanted to address all of the complaints people had had about it to craft a sequel that would truly cement this franchise as a must-play experience. For one thing, they went with the far more iconic “Ace Combat” moniker (which was a more direct translation of the Japanese title), and worked diligently to improve the graphics and play experience. Would these efforts pay off? Read on to find out…

Love

• Vastly Improved Graphics – While I didn’t mind how primitive Air Combat‘s graphics were, the degree of improvement in Ace Combat 2 is simply astounding. The difference in graphical fidelity between the two games is so drastic that it feels akin to a generational leap. While everything is now much more detailed, the main difference is that the skylines are actual rendered polygons rather than colour gradients. It’s not exactly the most realistic-looking game (the terrain in particular are still super blocky), but it’s a huge improvement and makes me feel kind of “wrong” for going so easy on the first game’s presentation.
• Mini-map – The first game’s mini-map was way too zoomed out to be useful, and only was available in first-person perspective (which sucks for me, because I play these games in third person view 95% of the time; I only really use first person when I’m trying to line up shots with the machine gun or feel “extra” immersed). Ace Combat 2 improves both of these issues by making its mini-map always available, no matter which perspective you choose, and it’s displaying a reasonably-sized area surrounding you. Even better, this system also shows you an enemy plane’s heading. If this sounds like a small change, it isn’t: knowing what direction an enemy is going means you can actually plan out maneuvers in a dogfight now. This one addition makes air-to-air combat vastly more fun than it was in the first game, where you often got stuck going in circles endlessly if you tried to pursue an enemy plane.
• Ace Pilots – Perhaps the coolest new feature in Ace Combat 2 is that there are now named enemy pilots in most missions. These enemies are always optional, and they are more challenging than standard enemies (with more challenging AI and sometimes taking more missiles to shoot them down), but you get a ton of money and post-mission accolades for shooting them down. I love that these are optional challenges, it makes me want to hunt them down every time they’re present.
• Replays – Ace Combat 2 saves your mission data while you play, which means that it can show a sick, multi-angle replay of the game-winning kill. That’s cool enough on its own, but each level also ends with a simplified, mini-map perspective of the battle, showing how you moved through the map and when/where you destroyed each enemy. It’s just a really cool feature!
• More Mission Types – Ace Combat 2 is largely building-upon and iterating the formula set by its predecessor, but it does find some new ways to shake up the standard dogfight, air superiority, and canyon run missions across its 21-level runtime. For example:
  • There’s a mission where you need to escort a fleet of ships, switching your priorities between destroying ground threats, shooting down enemy planes, and also juggling trying to shoot down the optional ace pilots if you’re up for the challenge. If you don’t manage and prioritize each threat effectively, these ships are in legitimate danger of being destroyed, so you need to be fast and judicious.
  • In one mission, you need to get extremely low to the ground and at a particular angle to fire missiles into an armoured silo’s exhaust system.
  • There’s also a mission where you need to fly inside a huge power plant in order to blow it up, but the twist is that you need to wait for ground saboteurs to open the doors for you, and then you have a very narrow window of time in which to make your attack run.
  • One mission also ends with a landing sequence, where you need to line up your plane with an aircraft carrier and slow down enough to be able to successfully come to a stop.
  • Finally, there’s also a mission where you need to destroy several advanced radar dishes, but they have jamming technology which prevents you from achieving missile lock, meaning that you’ll need to use your short-ranged machine gun to take them out. This level also mixes in a lot of varied terrain, so it’s effectively a canyon run at times without the harsh restrictions and credulity-straining narrative justification.

Mixed

• Branching Missions – Every once in a while, you’ll get the choice between one of two missions to embark on. The first game had this feature as well, but the difference here is that this makes the mission you didn’t choose inaccessible, necessitating at least two playthroughs in order to “see it all”. On top of this, certain missions are inaccessible unless you complete hidden objectives within the levels. I’m super mixed on all of this. On the one hand, the game’s twenty-one missions are all fairly short (anywhere from three to ten minutes), so it’s not a huge time commitment to replay the game. Branching paths would also have been a great feature when it released on the on PS1, where replayability was particularly important. However, I’m someone who likes to play a game, see all that there is to see in a single playthrough, and then move on. Knowing that there is substantial pieces of content that the game is arbitrarily closing off from me just annoys me. Like, obviously there are exceptions to this (ie, a big RPG where choices matter), but Ace Combat 2 is a linear, arcadey flight game – your choices aren’t making a difference to the way the game plays out. Just let me play all the levels, game! Again, I’m super mixed on this, but I can see this particular point being a “Love” for some players, so your mileage will definitely vary.
  • It also does not help that the game does not tell you what each mission will entail. You’ll get a very short blurb of the mission objective, but this doesn’t necessarily tell you how it will play. So, if you want to be sure you pick the mission you’re going to enjoy more, you have to select it, listen to the mission briefing, and then exit back to the mission select screen. It’s not a major issue, but it is annoying.

Hate

• Inconsistent Lock-on Range – In the first game (and most Ace Combat games, for that matter), your missiles will begin to lock-on right at 1000m. In Ace Combat 2, the lock-on range is very inconsistent. In general, missiles won’t lock-on until around ~900m, although sometimes this can get as low as 700-800m. While this isn’t too bad in dogfights, this change makes air-to-ground combat very frustrating. By the time you lock onto your target, you either are about to overshoot your target’s position, or you’ll be dangerously close to the ground and need to ascend immediately, taking the target back out of your sights. As a result, it’s much harder to get off two missiles in one pass against ground targets. If you try to push it and get that second shot in, there’s a very good chance you will crash into the ground. As a result, this often forces you into making additional strafing runs, which opens you up to enemy flak or ground collisions, and just makes missions arbitrarily take longer. And you can’t really slow down either, because then you’ll stall and just hit the ground anyway, and God help you if there’s a surface-to-air missile battery near your target. I never had an issue with air superiority missions in any other Ace Combat game I had played up to this point. This one little change in lock-on range just makes air-to-ground combat more annoying than it should be in this particular game, and is the one reason why I can’t say that this game renders its predecessor obsolete.
  • So why is this system like this? I am honestly not sure, but I think it might relate to each plane’s air-to-air and air-to-ground stats. However, I’m not even sure if this is the case, because there isn’t a ton of granularity between planes’ stats that would explain why some planes can lock on 400m sooner than others… it just baffles me and makes this game really frustrating at times.
• Cannot Compare Planes While in Purchase Menu – This is what it sounds like: when you’re buying a new plane, you can only see the planes you don’t currently own. Likewise, when you’re in your hangar, you can only see the planes you currently own. As a result, you have to manually keep track of your planes’ stats so you can know whether an aircraft you just unlocked is worth purchasing. The first game just let you buy and sell in the same menu so you could easily compare them, the extra steps added here are just annoying. This would be a legacy issue in many subsequent games, and is just as annoying there, but this game is the one which introduced it.
• That Fucking Cruise Missile – Spoiler alert here if you intend on playing this game yourself and care about the story for some reason… In the second-to-last mission, you hunt down an enemy submarine and blow it to smithereens. However, right as you destroy it, they launch a cruise missile at a city, and it’s up to you to shoot it down. Sounds simple enough… except that, for some undiscernible reason, your missiles won’t lock onto it, so you have to get within 500m and use your machine gun to shoot it down. This also could be fine, but the missile flies at an erratic speed and will suddenly make sharp turns without warning, so you’re going to struggle to get and stay within 500m, let alone land enough shots on it to shoot it down. Oh, and you only have a minute or two to accomplish this before the missile hits its target, which results in a game over and the game’s “bad ending”. Sure hope you saved before the mission started! This is just an extremely annoying way to cap off the game and all the artificial bullshit they added to make it more difficult had me contemplating whether I actually wanted to see the “real” ending or not. I ultimately persevered and pulled it off after about six or seven attempts, but it was not fun in the slightest.

Overall, I had a pretty great time with Ace Combat 2. The improved dogfighting instantly makes the moment-to-moment gameplay feel much more fun than its predecessor, and the graphical facelift is much-appreciated. It’s a solid refinement, and the sort of thing you’d hope to see from a sequel, but the changes to air-to-ground combat make the game a bit more frustrating than I’d like, and the slower pace makes it so that you no longer feel like you’re injecting fun directly into your veins. Still, it’s a very solid and refined sequel, which makes me excited to see how they can refine further upon it going forward.

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Barloq

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

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