Welcome back to the Ace Combat Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be going over the series’ most notorious entry, Ace Combat: Assault Horizon! After the sales disaster of Ace Combat 6 and the crap-tacular experiment that was Joint Assault, Bandai Namco badly needed to right the ship for their next console effort.
Oh, what’s that? They threw out the series’ tried and true formula for an “appeal to the West” effort designed for the Call of Duty crowd? Dear God… “read on to find out”, and all that…
Before we get into it, this game was annoyingly difficult to get running. First of all, I tried emulating the PS3 version, because the emulation scene for that console’s getting pretty good these days. Unfortunately, the game ran really poorly and had weird graphical issues, so that was a no-go. Okay, I’ll get the PC version then? Lol, nope, it was delisted from Steam years ago (presumably due to licensing issues) and you can only get remaining keys at a premium from resellers ($40 or more!!!). Okay… I’ll play it on Xbox One with backwards compatibility then…? Nope, it’s not backwards compatible. So that leaves me with two options: get a used PS3/Xbox 360 copy and hope that your twenty year old console doesn’t crap out on you, or try to pirate the abandonware PC version. I ended up giving the PC option a go, but the only version of the game you can find was flagging my anti-virus and I just didn’t think it was worth the risk. By this point, I just said “fuck it”, bought a copy to run on my Xbox 360, and hoped it wouldn’t give me a Red Ring before I reached the credits. This was by far the most effort I had to put in to play an Ace Combat title for these articles… and it was for goddamn Assault Horizon, the one entry every Ace Combat fan hates. Worse, it’s a fairly modern game, you’d think that it would be easy to play, but no. Unfortunately, the seventh console generation is turning into this black hole of modern accessibility, will several games being straight-up unavailable to purchase and difficult to get running on anything but legacy hardware (assuming the game even runs there).
Love
- “Launch” – Easily the best mission in Assault Horizon is “Launch”, where you get to pilot a huge bomber to attack an enemy missile site. It’s one of the few missions with some real variety to it, which makes it feel kind of like a classic Ace Combat scenario. The first part of the mission has you do a good ol’ canyon run, where you need to dodge enemy radar grids (represented visually by green cones). It’s very arcadey, and it’s quite difficult due to the bomber’s sluggish handling, but I honestly enjoyed this sequence. The real highlight though comes when you get through the radar traps and start to rain bombs down on the enemy. You select the drop zones and then you get to watch the bombs as they fall and blow the hell out of everything in the vicinity. It looks awesome in action. It makes me sad that we don’t have a couple more bomber levels, because this was hands-down the best part in the entire game.
- The Graphics – Credit where it’s due, Assault Horizon looks phenomenal in action. For a franchise which prides itself on top-of-the-line graphics, Project Aces really outdid themselves this time. The planes and environments look great in action, making for a real feast for the eyes.
- Enemy Planes “Bleed” – As part of its “appeal to COD gamers” marketing, Assault Horizon has this stupidly edgy tagline: “Make Metal Bleed”. I didn’t think a whole lot of this initially, but when you start playing the game, you’ll realize that they took this idea literally. I’m serious, when you shoot down a plane, the game will cut to this slow-mo view of the plane tearing itself apart with jet fuel spewing out like black blood. If you’re close enough when it happens, you’ll even splatter “blood” on your screen. I can get over the fact that the explosions would cause the fuel to catch fire rather than “bleed”, because the whole concept is so stupid and edgy that I kind of love it.
Mixed
- Scaled Down Size and Scope – I can only assume that someone at Bandai Namco felt that Ace Combat 6 failed financially because of its maximalist design philosophy, because they have turned around and made Assault Horizon easily the most intimate entry in the franchise. While there are plenty of planes and ground targets to deal with, the size of engagements has been scaled down dramatically and the number of things you’ll find yourself needing to deal with is far more limited. You’ll also find yourself in extreme close range of enemy planes all the time, presumably to make the game seem more action-packed and exciting. I think I definitely prefer the larger scale and ambition of Ace Combat 6 overall, but there is something nice about having a more-straightforward, less-chaotic battlefield to fight over again that’s hard to argue with.
- Piloting a Helicopter – Perhaps the most interesting new feature of Assault Horizon is the sequences where, for the first time in series history, you get to pilot a helicopter into battle. For a first try, I think that they nailed the feel and simplicity you’d expect from an Ace Combat game. The helicopter feels very different from piloting an airplane. You feel suitably maneuverable and powerful, and yet, vulnerable compared to the jets you’re used to piloting.
- However, the one big issue I have with the design is the helicopter’s “dodge” move, where it does a fucking barrel roll to avoid enemy fire. For a game that’s trying so hard to be grim and serious, it’s a dissonantly arcadey-looking animation.
- Real-World Locations – Once again, Assault Horizon takes us from Strangereal to the real world. My feelings are pretty much the same here as they were with Joint Assault: I’d rather be in Strangereal, but it sure does hit differently to see famous monuments and locations while in the middle of a battle. Assault Horizon doesn’t indulge in this nearly as often or blatantly as Joint Assault did (eg, most of the missions are not set in iconic locales). Assault Horizon also has a much more grounded, realistic tone compared to Joint Assault‘s sci-fi antics, so the real-world setting doesn’t feel nearly as incongruent. While it’s still a disappointing, generic, and unimaginative decision to set the game in the real world, it’s not really something you think about while playing, and it’s far from one of this game’s actual problems.
- Terrain Collisions – If I were to venture a guess on the most common cause of death for me in this franchise, I expect that colliding with the ground would easily take the top spot. Enemies aren’t threatening most of the time, but terrain has always been the great equalizer (especially in the entries with awful plane handling). As a result, I’m pretty mixed on Assault Horizon‘s much more forgiving collision damage system. If you hit terrain at an angle then, instead of just immediately killing you, you basically “bounce” off and take a considerable amount of damage in the process. While this is handy, it just feels wrong – I screwed up, I should be dead because of that. What makes this even more mixed for me is that Assault Horizon has a regenerating health system (because of course it does), so after a few seconds your penalty for making a mistake goes away entirely. I guess it’s kind of nice to not have to worry so much about terrain anymore, but it never feels right whenever you smash into the ground at high speed and just keep going.
Hate
- It’s Ace Combat Designed For People Who Don’t Like Ace Combat – Assault Horizon is set to the limited and simplified “Novice” control scheme from earlier Ace Combat games by default… which is kind of weird, because these have always been an optional scheme for new players. However, in this game they are referred to the “Optimal” controls. You can swap to a more traditional Ace Combat control scheme, but the game does not recommend it. I tried the “Optimal” controls at first, but after around a minute of sluggish turns, I just couldn’t do it. As soon as I swapped and had full control over my plane’s movement again, it felt like a relief. This is just one little, easily fixed thing, but it was the start of this sense that this game was not made for Ace Combat fans. This was just how the AAA games industry worked in the late 2000s to early 2010s, with attempts to gain mass appeal at the expense of franchises’ identity. Unfortunately, there’s a reason that this era of gaming is so loathed and why so many series which took the “mass appeal” pill never saw the light of day again. Spoiler alert, but this is going to be a recurring throughline as we go through the things that this game does poorly…
- Dumbed Down Aerial Combat – On the plus side, Assault Horizon retains the series’ tight and responsive controls. When you’re controlling a fighter jet, you can kind of play Assault Horizon like a traditional Ace Combat game. You still fly around, trying to get close enough to enemy targets until you lock onto them. You can then choose to fire two missiles to shoot them down as usual… you’re just not really supposed to.
- See, what Assault Horizon wants you to do is get a little bit closer to the enemy until a green ring appears. When this happens, you press L1+R1 to initiate “dogfight mode” (DFM), which seamlessly transitions you into a sort of on-rails shooter/QTE mini-game sequence. In this mode, you have a green ring that you need to center over the enemy plane, and you have some limited control over your plane to try to do this. After being centered for a couple seconds, the ring turns red and you can fire a missile to get a guaranteed hit. You can also fire your machine gun to get some bonus damage in. Meanwhile, the actual flight-path of your plane is completely scripted. This on-rails sequence often puts you into ridiculously dangerous maneuvers to make the whole thing seem more exciting (ie, flying extremely close to buildings and weaving around objects on the ground). While DFM works, it feels very dumbed down compared to Ace Combat‘s traditional aerial combat gameplay. Ace Combat dogfights aren’t complicated, but there’s at least some skill required to get behind an enemy plane and then know intuitively when you can hit them with a missile without wasting your shot. But here? Skill is almost entirely stripped from your hands as you do little more than keep the enemy inside a ring for a few seconds to get a guaranteed kill.
- Easily the most overpowered aspect of DFM is that you can activate it even if you aren’t behind an enemy. If an enemy happens to fly directly past you or strafes across your screen at close range, you can just press L1+R1 to initiate DFM and pretty much guarantee that they’ll be dead in seconds.
- Okay, so the basics of air combat are dumbed down, but that’s not even the end of it. If an enemy starts locking onto you, you can slow down and then hit L1+R1 to instantly flip the script and get behind that enemy and immediately destroy them. With this game’s regenerating health system and the addition of flares, you end up being basically invincible in most circumstances.
- On top of everything else we’ve already covered, the DFM system ultimately means that every dogfight you get into is going to play out the same way. You get in close, initiate DFM, and then do the same mini-game over and over again until the enemy blows up. For a system that’s presumably supposed to make the game more exciting, it ended up making the core gameplay wear thin very fast. Weirdly enough, DFM can make downing an enemy plane take longer than if you could just shoot them down normally.
- That brings me to perhaps my biggest gripe about DFM: I don’t get why they felt the need to shake-up the core gameplay to begin with. Is chasing down an enemy plane and shooting them yourself so boring and slow-paced that it required a fundamental gameplay shake-up? Does the mass-audience find airplanes so boring that they need to make dogfights more visually “exciting” and accessible? And, even if we assume that the answer to both questions is “yes”, are these new audiences even going to play the game anyway? DFM is a functional system, I guess, but it’s ultimately less-fun than Ace Combat‘s traditional gameplay and makes the game feel much worse in comparison to what’s come before.
- Anyway, so DFM’s pretty shallow. Here’s the thing: you could theoretically just ignore DFM and play Assault Horizon like a very mediocre Ace Combat game. However, in practice, this isn’t really viable. For one thing, the game will straight-up force you to use DFM at times, as many enemy pilots (denoted by a TGT_LEAD designator) are just too “skilled” to be taken down without it (which is code for “they cheat and break the rules of the game to be immune to normal missiles). Dodging incoming fire is also much more difficult than it used to be, which heavily encourages you to use DFM reversals to turn turn the tables on pursuers. Despite not really liking the system, I found myself mostly just using dogfight mode to make the missions go by faster. Oh, speaking of which…
- Mission Structure – Look, I don’t want to come across here like “Assault Horizon different, therefore bad”. I wanted to give this game a fair shake on its own merits, but a lot of my issues stem from one core, fundamental problem: the missions are just not fun to play. In accordance with its attempt to COD-ify the game, Assault Horizon‘s missions are all heavily scripted (akin to Ace Combat 5‘s approach). Again, this is not an inherently bad thing, but the problem here is that the scripting is just not interesting.
- Mission structure largely boils down to “go here, shoot the thing, now go here and shoot more things, now go here and shoot more things, etc”. It’s just shoot, shoot, shoot, ad nauseum. The lack of variety and agency within missions makes the game feel very dull.
- Making this worse, missions in Assault Horizon all feel like they go on for longer than they should. I believe that this is largely due to the way they’re structured, because I don’t feel any incentive to care about what’s going on. It’s just an endless parade of “go shoot the thing”, and I’m just expected to do it, rather than it being something I want to do. This is also somewhat a story presentation issue: the game will have lots of radio chatter which contextualizes the story and the mission progression, but it always just washed over me without sticking. So much of the chatter is inane and generic, so I just mentally tune it out. Objectives are rarely clear or emotionally resonant. I might have a general idea of what’s going on at any given time, but I never found myself caring about it, so when the game says “It’s very important that you shoot these things now!” it doesn’t feel any different to me. All Assault Horizon has is a desperate hope that endless shooting and explosions will carry it through, but it ended up being mind-numbing to me.
- Honestly, this whole issue made me reflect on prior Ace Combat games and their mission structures. I never felt like Ace Combat 04, Zero, or even 6 were dragging, even if those games’ missions were longer or slower-paced than Assault Horizon‘s missions. The reason for this, I believe, is that those games give you the freedom to do what you want. When you throw me into an open combat zone, give me some targets I can choose to go after, and a general objective to complete, I’ll happily spend all day going about it (in fact, I’ll complain when you end the mission early while I was enjoying myself). However, when Assault Horizon‘s giving me an endless string of “hey, here’s some new things to blow up”, I struggle to care because it feels like endless monotony.
- Dumbed Down Air-to-Ground Combat – Oh hey, if you thought that the air-to-air combat was the only thing that Assault Horizon would screw up, think again. Around halfway through the game, Assault Horizon introduces “Air Strike Mode” (ASM), it’s DFM-equivalent for ground attacks. This system sets an entry point which you need to approach and then press L1+R1 when the green ring appears (similarly to DFM). You then get to fly your plane through a pre-set strafing run, complete with big, green arrows telling you where you need to go. It’s not nearly as on-rails as DFM is, thankfully, but it’s still not great system.
- One of the nicer aspects of ASM is that, most of the time, you can completely ignore it and just blow up ground targets yourself. In fact, I found the game to actually be easier when I did this, because I wouldn’t be forced to slowly fly straight into enemy anti-air units. However, then there are cases where the game just straight-up does not let you destroy certain enemies until you go into ASM, which is always really annoying. Making this worse are “emergency ASM” sequences where you not only have to use ASM, but you need to blow up every target in one run or fail the mission. Having to restart a mission because the game took control away from you to show you a sick, slo-mo explosion, causing you to fly over and miss a designated target is never fun.
- The Game Fucking Cheats – If you pay any attention while playing Assault Horizon, you will quickly come to realize that this game breaks its own rules all the fucking time in a manner that feels ridiculously unfair:
- The first and most obvious example of this is what the game lets you target at any given point. The game is so heavily scripted that you can seeing masses of enemy planes, ground targets, and ships, but you are not allowed to shoot them until the game tells you that you can. There are several occasions where you’ll be blasting a building or enemy ship, blow up all the targets on it, and then suddenly the game will spawn in more targets on it… because I guess the four SAMs that you can now destroy weren’t a problem five seconds earlier…? There’s also some really funny sequences where you’ll clear out an area for allies, they’ll move forward a few steps, and all of a sudden enemies are spawning from behind them in the area your allies were just occupying. Were they just hiding there the whole time???
- There’s a particularly egregious examples of this that happens all the time and the game just hopes you won’t notice. There are lots of non-essential enemy planes flying around in every mission. You’re typically going to ignore them and go after the main targets, but this is a mistake, because these extra planes will literally teleport behind you and start shooting you in the ass. I’m not kidding here, if you watch your mini-map, you can literally see them zoom in at five thousand kilometers per hour, suddenly stop right behind you, and instantly get a missile lock-on. As stupid as that is, you can’t even reliably dodge missiles by turning your plane sharply, you usually need to use the DFM missile dodge QTE to guarantee survival, which ends up wasting your time and pulls you away from whatever you were already trying to accomplish at the time.
- There’s also sequences where the game doesn’t follow its own rules for AA fire or missile ranges. In the mission “Hostile Fleet”, you have to do strafing runs on an enemy carrier, but this thing will be landing shots on you from well outside missile lock-on and AA range. I ended up having to redo this section over and over again because the game was just fucking cheating ceaselessly. By this game’s “normal” rules, I should not be getting hit at the range I’m at, but I just kept getting riddled with bullets and missiles from teleporting planes. Not only that, but your missiles have weak tracking outside DFM, but enemy missiles stick to your ass like glue.
- Oh, want to hear another infuriating moment in “Hostile Fleet”? So I’m getting peppered by AA fire, I’ve got planes teleporting behind me and shooting me down without any chance for counter-play… fine, I’m going to focus down these stupid planes then to make this easier on me. Guess what? You can’t use DFM on them because the game doesn’t want you to shoot them down!!! I don’t even remember how I managed to complete this mission, but I was on a razor’s edge of just saying “fuck it” and quitting, because the level of scripting in this game is so transparently bullshit.
- However, this hit a breaking point in the final level of the game. You get into a boss fight with the “Big Bad”, and this son of a bitch cheats like mad. You end up having to hit him with dozens of missiles and machine gun rounds, all while he can fire missiles behind himself to hit you while you shoot at him. I’ll tell you, I ended up dying here (literally about a minute or two from the end credits) enough times that I just said “Fuck it, I’m done. Fuck this game and it’s bullshit.”
- Call of Duty Rip-off Sequences – Look, I’ve been disparagingly mentioning Call of Duty throughout this article, not because I’m a hater, but because Ace Combat is not Call of Duty, no matter how hard it tries to be. Trying to force Call of Duty into Ace Combat just makes the end product feel desperate and generic… which is best exemplified by the sequences are which are ripped directly out of Call of Duty:
- First of all, there’s the turret sections. There are a couple levels where you play as a chopper gunner and have to play an on-rails sequence where you gun down enemies. Making the Call of Duty influence even more obvious, these sequences are set in a north-African town and around a series of cargo ships. These are exactly like any other turret sequence you’ve ever played: very generic and unexciting.
- Then there’s the AC-130 sequence, which is clearly only here because of how big a deal the AC-130 sequences in Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2 were in the late 2000s. It’s straight out of the playbook, but it feels worse because Project Aces failed to capture that same sort of disturbing realism which made Call of Duty‘s take on this so memorable. Which I think segues well into…
- Killing People Feels… Weird – There’s always been this strange disconnect in Ace Combat where you know that your actions are killing people, but because there’s always a plane, ship, tank, building, etc that you’re blowing up, it doesn’t feel like you’re killing someone. Canonically, we know that sometimes they survive the attack. You never really saw them die, so that’s always a possibility. I never really even thought about this aspect of the series at all… until I was put into a turret section and then watched dozens of human beings writhe as I pumped them full of lead with a minigun. It just felt… wrong, in a way that seems antithetical to the series’ identity.
- A big reason why Ace Combat 04‘s story was so good was because it made you care about the people you would soon be forced to kill. Similarly, Ace Combat 3 and Zero make you question the morality of “just following orders”, actively making you aware of the choices you make and their consequences. Contrast that with Assault Horizon, where you’re killing wave after wave of generic, evil “rebel forces” that hate you. We never really get a sense of what this conflict is even about or why these “African mercenaries” are willing to die in droves to oppose you. “They’re the bad guys, so they must die” is pretty much the entire philosophy of this game’s conflict.
- Here’s the thing: showing the death you are causing could actually be good thing for the series. The problem is that the game doesn’t confront you with it, it just assumes that you’re going to be cool with shooting all these people because they’re the bad guys and they’ve got it coming. No one ever questions what you’re doing. There are never any civilians in the area who may become collateral damage. Hell, there are levels where everyone in the vicinity ends up being a terrorist, so you get to shoot them with abandon. It just feels… off, especially given how the War on Terror ended up going (which would have been very much understood by the time 2011 rolled around, so Project Aces can’t even plead ignorance).
As you can see, I’ve got a lot of gripes about Assault Horizon, but at the end of the day… it’s just “mediocre”. It’s a competent action game which desperately wants to sell millions of copies, but in the process of getting there, Project Aces have made a game that pleases absolutely no one. It might have even been more entertaining if it was a truly awful trainwreck, but it’s not even that bad: it’s just a worse take on Ace Combat with a bunch of features designed for people who don’t like Ace Combat. You can’t really sugarcoat it, at the end of the day, that whole mindset is just dumb.
Perhaps the saddest part about all of this is that Project Aces clearly put a lot of work into making DFM, ASM, and other new features work. Unfortunately, as I have said, this is solving issues that were never problems to begin with, and the “solutions” they’ve bolted on just make the game worse overall. Imagine what Assault Horizon could have been if these resources had been put towards strengthening and expanding the core elements of Ace Combat. Would it have sold more than a million copies? Maybe, it’s hard to say, but the resulting game certainly would have resonated more strongly with its core audience.
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
