[Ignite 2011] Must... Avoid... Kenny... Loggins... Reference
Crap, we couldn't do it. That's just what Ace Combat Assault Horizon does to a man.
Published: February 4, 2011
We mentioned this in our big ass rundown of everything at Ignite 2011, but the Ace Combat series, as much as we absolutely adore it, is starting to feel a bit... familiar, and we all know about familiarity and contempt and graham crackers, don't we? Okay, maybe just that first one leading to the second one. The third is something... special. It's also neither here nor there.
What is important is what Namco's doing about it. In a bit of a divergent path from their attempt to give Ridge Racer a kick in the pants, Ace Combat is staying in-house with their newest entry into the franchise, helmed by the same Project Aces team as past entries. That's a good thing, of course, for keeping the series in line with past projects, but there was an undeniable need to do something to move the series away from long-range dogfights that had essentially boiled down to a lock-on and pair of missiles being sent into the business end of a multi-million-dollar jet fighter.
That something is the Close-Range Assault System, and as the name implies, it's meant to be carried out when the distance between craft is close enough that those tragically underused machine guns can be whipped out for some serious mid-air carnage. When in range, pressing the L1 and R1 buttons will enter a sort of guided tailing maneuver, and so long as players can keep enemies within the generous targeting circle in the middle of the screen, death can be dealt with spectacularly explosive results.
Unloading on another plane with bullets is obviously a far less destructive method than just firing rockets, but the results are infinitely more satisfying this way (and, for those wondering, you can of course still shoot down targets with missiles from afar). The camera pulls into what is best described as an over-the-cockpit angle akin to the over-the-shoulder views of most third-person shooters. The machine guns burp fire at hundreds of rounds per minute, chewing up the target plane one tiny impact at a time. By the time the plane is finally destroyed, the close-up view offers a massive explosion and then slows time to show the tumbling, scarred hulk moments before it detonates, with your plane flying through the wreckage.
It looks... well, the word "awesome" might be rather trite, but it really is a perfect descriptor; there's a definitely sense of awe watching a kind of Burnout-style close-up shot of the finishing strike before the plane is torn apart by an explosion, and the close-up camera ends up making the game feel not unlike SEGA's classic arcade game After Burner. They've turned Ace Combat into After Burnout, and that's not nearly as sacrilegious as it may sound.
The mid-air QTE-style table-turning move that we witnessed, however, might just be (not that we're complaining). Apparently only successful about 1/3 of the time, the live demo we watched let it all play out exactly as someone would hope for, with a lock-on broken by way of a slick little mid-air brake and turn, at which point the camera swung under the plane to highlight the rocket bay doors opening before tracking with the missiles as they screamed toward the one-time attacker and offering a nice, close view of the resulting explosion.
The series is also making the jump from fictional warring nations to the ones that are actually going at it here in the real world, apparently going for a more gritty, realistic set of characters and situations to complement that more grounded (har har har) approach to the setting. An extremely brief peek at things (we're talking maybe 10-15 seconds, tops) was shown, but of course that only served to show that the series is keeping their CG cutscenes rather than any sort of still-frame or even animated approaches to unraveling the story. That story takes place in 2015 and centers on one William Bishop (hey, great last name!) as he struggles with... something bad.
Given how little we'd like to go fly with the angels, the verdict's still out on how cringe-worthy this one will be, but we'll give the Project Aces team the benefit of the doubt, and so long as the game ends with some kind of massive against-all-odds attack on some super-advanced weapon, we'll forgive any transgressions that might happen over the course of the story. If nothing else, the team is actively courting the community, offering a Facebook contest that will let artists create their own skins for the plane, one of which will become part of the game's liveries.
It can sound a little scary, all this talk of close-up cameras and loosely-controlled machine gun takedowns in the middle of crowded locales, but when you actually see someone locking onto an enemy and then unloading on them as both planes tear through the middle of skyscrapers in a densely-populated city, barely avoiding construction cranes or hundreds-story-tall buildings, you sort of learn to let go and just enjoy the ride. And the ride, so far, looks seriously explosive if nothing else. We'll have more soon. And hey, if this little experiment doesn't work out, purists can take comfort in the fact that this is not Ace Combat 7, and the team was adamant about that. Small comforts, we know, but right now all we want to do is actually get our hands on the damn game, whatever it's called.
What is important is what Namco's doing about it. In a bit of a divergent path from their attempt to give Ridge Racer a kick in the pants, Ace Combat is staying in-house with their newest entry into the franchise, helmed by the same Project Aces team as past entries. That's a good thing, of course, for keeping the series in line with past projects, but there was an undeniable need to do something to move the series away from long-range dogfights that had essentially boiled down to a lock-on and pair of missiles being sent into the business end of a multi-million-dollar jet fighter.
That something is the Close-Range Assault System, and as the name implies, it's meant to be carried out when the distance between craft is close enough that those tragically underused machine guns can be whipped out for some serious mid-air carnage. When in range, pressing the L1 and R1 buttons will enter a sort of guided tailing maneuver, and so long as players can keep enemies within the generous targeting circle in the middle of the screen, death can be dealt with spectacularly explosive results.
Unloading on another plane with bullets is obviously a far less destructive method than just firing rockets, but the results are infinitely more satisfying this way (and, for those wondering, you can of course still shoot down targets with missiles from afar). The camera pulls into what is best described as an over-the-cockpit angle akin to the over-the-shoulder views of most third-person shooters. The machine guns burp fire at hundreds of rounds per minute, chewing up the target plane one tiny impact at a time. By the time the plane is finally destroyed, the close-up view offers a massive explosion and then slows time to show the tumbling, scarred hulk moments before it detonates, with your plane flying through the wreckage.
It looks... well, the word "awesome" might be rather trite, but it really is a perfect descriptor; there's a definitely sense of awe watching a kind of Burnout-style close-up shot of the finishing strike before the plane is torn apart by an explosion, and the close-up camera ends up making the game feel not unlike SEGA's classic arcade game After Burner. They've turned Ace Combat into After Burnout, and that's not nearly as sacrilegious as it may sound.
The mid-air QTE-style table-turning move that we witnessed, however, might just be (not that we're complaining). Apparently only successful about 1/3 of the time, the live demo we watched let it all play out exactly as someone would hope for, with a lock-on broken by way of a slick little mid-air brake and turn, at which point the camera swung under the plane to highlight the rocket bay doors opening before tracking with the missiles as they screamed toward the one-time attacker and offering a nice, close view of the resulting explosion.
The series is also making the jump from fictional warring nations to the ones that are actually going at it here in the real world, apparently going for a more gritty, realistic set of characters and situations to complement that more grounded (har har har) approach to the setting. An extremely brief peek at things (we're talking maybe 10-15 seconds, tops) was shown, but of course that only served to show that the series is keeping their CG cutscenes rather than any sort of still-frame or even animated approaches to unraveling the story. That story takes place in 2015 and centers on one William Bishop (hey, great last name!) as he struggles with... something bad.
Given how little we'd like to go fly with the angels, the verdict's still out on how cringe-worthy this one will be, but we'll give the Project Aces team the benefit of the doubt, and so long as the game ends with some kind of massive against-all-odds attack on some super-advanced weapon, we'll forgive any transgressions that might happen over the course of the story. If nothing else, the team is actively courting the community, offering a Facebook contest that will let artists create their own skins for the plane, one of which will become part of the game's liveries.
It can sound a little scary, all this talk of close-up cameras and loosely-controlled machine gun takedowns in the middle of crowded locales, but when you actually see someone locking onto an enemy and then unloading on them as both planes tear through the middle of skyscrapers in a densely-populated city, barely avoiding construction cranes or hundreds-story-tall buildings, you sort of learn to let go and just enjoy the ride. And the ride, so far, looks seriously explosive if nothing else. We'll have more soon. And hey, if this little experiment doesn't work out, purists can take comfort in the fact that this is not Ace Combat 7, and the team was adamant about that. Small comforts, we know, but right now all we want to do is actually get our hands on the damn game, whatever it's called.
