Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation

"Not Quite Top Gun"

Ace Combat 6 is, of course, the sixth game in the series of fighter plane combat games. AC6, compared to its predecessors, brings in a great makeover in graphics and adds a few new gameplay quirks but it's essentially the same fighter plane experience.

Ace Combat 6 doesn't really have much of a great story. It's a fairly typical story of the nation Emmeria being attacked by another country, Estovakia and the war between them. There are numerous cut scenes peppered in between gameplay levels.. But the scenes tend to focus on characters that are on the ground that have no real appearance in during gameplay. It makes it seem as the player doesn't have a part in AC6's world. Cut scenes can also be annoying since I don't feel for these characters I don't even know anything about. AC6's story is basically an excuse to cause all the fighting and the scenes are simply breaks between levels.

One glance at it will tell you all you need to know. Ace Combat 6 looks freakin' amazing. The planes all share a huge amount of detail. The clouds really like look real clouds. When your at high altitudes, the landscape is just beautiful with it's leaf green planes and deep canyons. But only at high altitudes, which brings to mind, a problem with AC6's graphics. When your dangerously close to buildings, things start looking ugly. Objects at close range have muddled textures and blurry graphics. Grass will begin looking like what that possessed girl threw up in The Exorcist and the buildings will start looking like gray Play-Doh. But you usually won't notice unless you fly within a hair's breadth of the ground or building.

Another minor problem with the visuals is the dubbing. Remember that scene in Kung Pow, where the one fat, Chinese guy is asked who the new student is? You see his mouth move up and down as if he were talking but there's no dialogue. After 8 seconds of mouth moving, you finally hear "I don't know." That is the result of intentionally bad dubbing that's funny. It happens in Ace Combat 6 too. Except it wasn't intentional. Just bad. Really bad. Thank God, there's not much talking in the scenes though. Most of it's narration.

Well, let's talk about how fun this game is now shall we? AC6 is really a mixed bag. Most of it is due to the huge learning curve for first time players like me. Even now, I still have a little trouble moving around. It's probably due to me using the flight-stick. Controls are fairly simple enough; it just takes a lot of time getting used to.

AC6 can be fun most of the time but quite a few levels, especially ones in the beginning, can be void of anything exciting. This is due in part because of AC6's almost simulator like gameplay. It's difficult to make a simulator very fun but Ace Combat achieves this task to a point. Flight feels totally authentic and so does dispatching foes with multiple lock on missiles. A new addition to Ace Combat's gameplay is the allied support system. Your Emmerian armies are divided up into different companies that are all fighting the Estovakians on the same battlefield. How this works is when you assist a certain fighting company, they'll free up from their task and then they can assist you buy giving you cover fire or attack other opponents. I have no idea what it's so fun to use but it's a sight to behold when you see 20 planes attacking a huge fortress with a great bombardment of missiles and firepower.

Another new addition is the operation system. Everyone knows wars are made of battles. IN AC6, every battle is made of operations. Most battles consist of numerous operations. Complete a set number of operations, and the battles won. It's a neat addition but it's nothing groundbreaking. I'd rather have Ace Combat's 5 style of making levels where they have a whole lot of levels instead of Ace Combat 6 where they would have 15 levels made of different operations that would total up to last about 8 hours of game time.

Much of the gameplay is the same old Ace Combat type gameplay of finding a target, locking on, and destroying it with a missile. There are some great parts in the game which are exciting like you and your co-pilot have to hold out against a huge armada of probably 30 jets that are on your tail. But for every great part is also a mediocre or just plain bad scenario. I won't tell you what some of them are but there are parts where the enemy units are a major annoyance and are near impossible to hit since they're so fast. But if your able to put up with these minor, but numerous problems, you'll find joy in playing though Ace Combat 6.

RENT OR BUY- I bought the version with the flight stick and boy, I sure wish I didn't spend $150 on this game. But it was still fun, just not worth the cash put into it. I'd be in a dilemma on whether to buy this game or not if I didn't buy it already. I guess the best thing to do would be to rent it. The single-player's not too lengthy, it'll last only around 8-10 hours. There's multiple difficulties for this game that's already hard as hell on normal, and you can replay through it to get all the operations. I'd suggest buying only if you loved the previous Ace Combats, or if you love airplane sims.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 12/03/07

Game Release: Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation (w/Flightstick) (US, 10/23/07)