Ace Combat: Assault Horizon places me into an awkward position.
On the one hand, it is damned hard to make flying a jet fighter through epic dogfights not exhilarating. My inner child, the one who watched Top Gun as a kid until my parents must have conveniently “lost” the video, is very easily pleased when it comes to such things.
On the other hand, while Assault Horizon can be an obvious joy to play, taken as a whole the flaws of its single-player campaign are obvious. Nobody expects an Ace Combat title to be Shakespearian in scope or grandeur, but Assault Horizon’s sometimes-sloppy choices hinder the play experience considerably. It’s especially disappointing given that the game’s story was evidently written by a professional author and that in so many other ways Assault Horizon fills a sadly-underrepresented niche.
Assault Horizon isn’t the first Ace Combat to be set in the modern world, but it’s unfortunate that its narrative bear so much similarity to the Generic Military Shooter so common these days. Come 2015, a massive and suspiciously well-supplied revolution breaks out in Africa. A UN Task Force, including protagonist William Bishop and several other US airmen, is dispatched to put down the revolt, only to find it armed with new (most definitely not a nuke, honest!) bombs known as Trinity. In almost no time at all, the predictable betrayal occurs, and Bishop and Friends find themselves engaged in a war spanning the globe.
Assault Horizon takes the interesting approach of varying between three broad types of missions. Missions conducted by Bishop are aerial assaults, usually either dogfights or air-strike missions. Other missions put the player at the helm of an Apache gunship strafing ground forces and the occasional enemy Hind chopper. Interspersed here and there is an occasional rail-shooter mission. That said, jet fighters are still the stars of the show, and the majority of missions are through Bishop’s eyes.
You can’t fault Assault Horizon’s creators for variety, but sometimes things are a bit uneven.
As mentioned above, a good dogfight in Assault Horizon is joyous. Against a good enemy pilot (and the game very clearly includes good and bad enemy flyers) a dogfight is a battle of wits and patience more than a twitch-game, an impression emphasized by the new cinematic dogfight mechanics. The controls can be tricky, and the standard missiles’ accuracy is often spotty, but that just makes the differences in skill and precision more crucial. Scoring a direct hit with a missile, or burning a plane out of the sky with a machine gun, is always satisfying.
Hellicopter sequences are a bit harder to pin down. They’re never bad, but they largely amount to destroying fixed targets on the ground while locked onto them and avoiding incoming anti-aircraft fire. Active and vigorous AI participation would help spice these sequences up, but as usual the AI allies are nearly useless. Battles against enemy Hinds display the limitations of Assault Horizon’s helicopters– it’s incredibly difficult both to maneuver and to fight, so it doesn’t feel like an agile dance of death so much as a mobile turret. It makes for a good interlude now and again, but the game doesn’t quite seem to know what to do with the Apache.
The on-rails sections of the game are pure filler. A purely-gunnery position in this sort of game feels more like an interactive cutscene than anything else. It’s obvious that they were inserted to keep the jet sequences from becoming boring and tell the parts of the story that Bishop wouldn’t be able to witness, but they also taper off relatively quickly.
Assault Horizon’s campaign isn’t really a very cohesive narrative. Quite a bit of its development takes place off-screen, and its characters never really develop enough to make them compelling individuals as opposed to archetypes. There’s a thread of sorts about Bishop’s dreams of his own death in combat, but it never actually builds beyond foreshadowing and ultimately doesn’t pan out. The central antagonist is almost a purely evil caricature and only gets a few short stints on-screen – realistic, mind you, but not narratively satisfying enough to create a genuine sense of who he is and why he’s doing what he’s doing.
That isn’t to say that Assault Horizon lacks exciting moments. It’s got neat set pieces in spades. It’s difficult not to get excited when desperately shooting down ICBMs or destroying enemy bombers on an approach run to Moscow or Washington DC or engaged in a white-knuckled dogfight with an enemy ace. Even if the core narrative is shallow, the individual scenes are evocative enough in isolation to manipulate you into caring anyways. It’s not the most skillful writing technique, but for what amounts to a big-budget action movie it’ll suffice to keep the game entertaining.
A root issue with Assault Horizon’s narrative that causes real and concrete gameplay drawbacks is the choice of a modern Earth. Yes, it’s entirely possible to tell a compelling story in modern, realistic times. However, by setting itself in a contemporary environment, Assault Horizon forswears many of the series staples and major attractions. Traditional Ace Combat bears little resemblance to a modern military story and more to an animesque tale of heroic aces and worthy adversaries, an excellent mold for the arena of combat long typified as “knights of the sky.”
Unfortunately, great fidelity to Earth as the setting strips Assault Horizon of such romantic trappings. Real-world conflicts mean real-world weapons, so no exotic, larger-than-life flying fortresses or vast cannons to frame missions around. Real-world conflict also means realistic communications discipline, robbing Assault Horizon of colorful enemy aces and melodramatic fight dialogue – and it just feels wrong for a game about larger-than-life ace pilots who rack up dozens of kills per engagement to only feature two named enemy aces who only appear in a handful of (admittedly exhilarating) missions.
None of these absences are crucial in and of themselves, and as I said above Assault Horizon is still a very solid single-player experience. Multiplayer, too, is enormously entertaining, even if the game’s stable of fighters isn’t properly balanced such that all the planes remain useful. And the mainstream field of fighter subgenre action-shooters is so parched lately that none of these should really dissuade you from giving the game a try.
But it’s these imperfections, some more niggling than others, that disappoint. As good as Assault Horizon is, it could have easily an even better title. Hopefully, its success will revitalize the series enough for that even-better title to materialize in the future.