Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War
The best arcade flight game ever made? You betcha.
Published: November 16, 2004
Almost all of the action during the missions is still delivered with the in-game engine, which is certainly up to the task of rendering environments while at 10,000 feet -- particularly some of the sequences showing the planes banking and soaring in formation complete with slick camera whips and zooms -- but when things drop down to ground level, the old problem of mottled, painfully stretched ground textures rear their decidedly fugly heads.
This wouldn't be such a huge problem if Namco had left things in the air, but a few missions near the middle of the game drop down into the city, and during one mission actually have a tiny, low-polygon car screaming around the "streets" of the city, treating your eyes to a hideous mess of black and grey with specks of amber and brown thrown in. There aren't even visible streets, and after oohing and ahhing over the rest of the game, it feels like a letdown.
Fortunately, the rest of the game is absolutely gorgeous, including the menus, which have long been some of the most amazing examples of minimalist design I've ever seen in games. Most of the menus are split into a sort of hierarchy of boxes, which are then zoomed into for the top menu choices. You can actually see the breakdown of the submenus and how deeply nested they are when the whole view is zoomed out. The rest of the selections stay with the familiar grid of simple lines and boxes.
Even exiting the briefings (which retain the same simplistic nature as the previous games, using a plotted set of dots to show terrain undulations, and zippy opening and closing menus to showcase the maps) have a slick little effect when they're all closed where the terrain slips off, then windows all close one at time before you fade out to the amazingly short loading screen. The start of the briefing shows a couple of drop-down dialogues and a short progress bar akin to an older Mac starting up. It's truly a joy to watch -- even after the 30th time.
One of the series' hallmarks is the driving, dramatic score that punctuates any of the really intense missions, and composer Keiki Kobayashi keeps this well alive with the fifth iteration. There's just something about a pounding, tense undercurrent of percussion riding along with terse, bold orchestrated movements. It quite literally gives you the feeling that your screaming along at 800 miles an hour to a Jerry Bruckheimer movie soundtrack, and it's absolutely fantastic all the way through. Even the more tender moments are lifted by light piano or faux-string audio backdrops.
The voice acting (which I touched on a bit back), is solid overall, but you can tell some voice actors pulled double- or even triple-duty supplying some of the voices for both friendly and enemy fighters (or at least they sound so damned close it almost feels like you're hearing the same person talking from different cockpits). It's not a huge issue, since obviously the voices are good enough to carry multiple roles, but it is a little odd when you're hoping to hear the voice of a person you haven't heard for a while, only to do a aural double-take when you hear an enemy commander, pilot and fellow soldier all sound like them.
Jacked-up difficulty and marathon levels aside, there's really nothing stopping anyone from loving this game just as much after 15 hours as they did after the first 15 minutes. The missions are incredibly fun and still impressively complex and original after five games, and the storyline, while nothing groundbreaking, is definitely more complex than you're likely to see in any other flight game. Go get this game, fire up your copy of Top Gun and skip to the combat scenes for a few minutes, crank up the Kenny Loggins for a nice boost of adrenaline and git to playing. Go on, git!
