Backlog Beatown: Charting Fortunes with Uncharted: Drakes Fortune

I bought Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Trilogy soon after I gained access to a PlayStation 4; having been on Xbox and PC for most of the years prior, I hadn’t played any Uncharted games prior. I knew the basic premise of the game, (Gears of War meets Tomb Raider,) and I knew the lead character Nathan Drake was a wise-cracking rogue who could never quite make you sure whether you wanted to buy him a drink or deck him, but other than that, Uncharted was a blind buy.

Straight in the nuts. You know
you want to!

I had a go with the first of the three games it showcases – Uncharted: Drakes Fortune – and I found what for me was a standard action-adventure. You play as Nathan Drake; an Indiana Jones-like character who bears a passing resemblance to a younger Gerard Butler and is voice-acted by the renowned Nolan North. You’re on a quest to find the treasure of El Dorado, either for fame and fortune or for the fact that you may or may not be related to Sir Francis Drake who was looking for the treasure originally – probably a little of both. Along the way, you get caught up in a conflict of interest between Sully, your mentor, Elena, a reporter, and a group of criminals and mercenaries who also want to find El Dorado. Conflict escalates, and you are forced to run, gun and jump your way through an increasingly hostile environment as you search to find the truth behind the treasure and save your friends.

There are two main sections to the game: Platforming, in which you jump from wall-section to ledge in order to traverse difficult-to-get-to areas, and combat, which mainly involves shootouts with modern-day pirates. The platforming is not difficult; it is rarely a challenge to see where you need to go and even if you do get stuck, the game will show you where you’re supposed to be going next if you stand still for a few seconds. Once you know where you’re going, the route is usually obvious, and the challenge is avoiding traps and making sure you don’t linger to long on a ledge lest it crumble beneath your feet.

The bulk of the game's action is in scenes like this.

The combat is standard cover-based shooting, and is handled well enough, with the one puzzling exception that grenades are mapped to L1 (R1 is the standard, right?) You shoot some enemies, move up to the next area, find some cover and shoot some more enemies. There is an array of weapons in the game, but you can only carry two at a time; a pistol and one other weapon. These are what you would expect; machine guns, shotguns and grenade launchers. Uncharted is very much “of it’s time” in terms of its level design; the ammo pick-ups are in all the right places so you’re never out-gunned, and conserving resources between one fight and the next is rarely a consideration. One particularly memorable moment near the end of the game came when I was in a church with snipers in the raised areas; this could have presented a very different challenge if there hadn’t been a sniper rifle lying around in the first place you dive for cover; classic 7^th gen design!

I mean, even if Wikipedia wasn't a thing,
you'd know how this was going to end up...

Uncharted is presented well; the voice-acting is spot-on, and the graphics are good for their time. The sounds are as good as they need to be, the gun sounds work fine and the music fits the environments, though it isn’t particularly memorable. The game is not especially long, but it tells a fun story with an effective twist, and it doesn’t outstay it’s welcome.

It’s difficult to know how to call this one. While I was writing this, I had to go back and check all the times I’d written the word “Standard” and go back and change some of them. Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune was released in 2007 and, while it’s still fun to play now, doesn’t bring anything to the table that wasn’t there before. It’s as standard as a 7^th generation game gets, and is very competently put together, but now that I’ve got to the end of it, I’ll be more likely to put it to bed than go hunting for all the achievement trophies.

Final Score: 3/5. Worth a look.

Backlog Beatdown: Crashing in to Bandicoots with Crash Bandicoot

Crash Bandicoot was an unusual acquisition for me. When I moved in with my girlfriend last year, she had a PlayStation 4 and Crash Bandicoot: N-Sane Trilogy was one of the games she had for it. I’d played Crash before, of course; when you’ve grown up in the 90s when everyone and their cat had a PlayStation, it was almost impossible not to. But I’d never really enjoyed it enough to make it a worthwhile purchase, even when I had a PlayStation. But having come to the end of two quite heavy games, I decided to give it a go. Please note, therefore, that these notes refer to the HD remake for the PlayStation 4 – not the original game.

More or less what I looked like after clearing the game.

You play as the titular Crash Bandicoot, who has been mutated into a sentient being by Doctor Neo Cortex, and having escaped, now must make his way across the Wumpa islands to rescue his girlfriend Tawna. Along the way, you jump platforms, dodge traps, spin-attack enemies and defeat bosses. It was a video game typical of its time, with the exception that this was still in an age where mascot platformers sold systems, and there’s an argument to be made for the idea that Crash would do this for their PlayStation. It was also one of the first times that a platform game had been made in 3D – though in practice, the levels were rather linear, and most of the time you were moving up into the environment rather than across it, which was more typical of 2D platformers.

Crash was made at a very special time of video game design where – for the first time – consoles could run 3D software, and a lot of games were made to accommodate that. Some were better than others, and often the technology would run away the design which would fall flat on its face. Crash Bandicoot is not without its issues, but it manages to strike a balance between the creative necessity of the time and being well-designed enough to prevent these teething problems from alienating its fan base. 3D platforming is always a tricky business, because you require a certain amount of depth perception in order to correctly make the jumps. I died a lot in Crash Bandicoot, but that was mostly because I’d misjudged a jump, got caught in a trap or fallen down a pit – the enemies were the least of my problems!

Achieving invulnerability is always fun...

With that being said, it was a lot of fun. The levels are short and snappy, and reasonably well-designed. The controls are tight enough, although the design of the environment lends itself better to the directional pad rather than the thumb stick as your principle method of movement. The lives system is left over from previous-generation games, but since the only penalty for losing all of them is that you have to start from the beginning of a level rather than the last checkpoint, it doesn’t get in the way of the enjoyment of the game. The graphics have received an overhaul for the HD remake, and they look fine; they’re as good as they need to be. There was no need to aim for hyper-realism in a game about a mutant bandicoot! The sounds are wonderful; 5^th-generation consoles were able to play CD-quality audio for the first time and developers lost no time in taking advantage of that fact. It’s frustrating in places, but the frustration never gets so bad as to stop you from playing if you’re determined to clear the game. The save menu could have done with an overhaul – under no circumstances is it acceptable to be able to save and load your game on the same screen in this day and age – but that’s the only thing that ought to have been changed for the remake.

Having got to the end of the game I’m now faced with the task of unlocking all the paths, gems, ankhs and boxes, and while this is fine for post-game content, it’s not something I’m particularly interested in doing. All in all, Crash Bandicoot is a good game that anyone could enjoy – but the old-school design means that some people will enjoy it more than others.

Final Score: 4/5: Great game.

Last Week's Games: Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes

This week I have had very little time to play games. I pre-empted this and played Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes. Knowing the game was very short and that I could potentially beat it in one night, I gave it a go, and I did. This will end up on Backlog Beatdown eventually but I haven’t finished my write-up. In order to avoid publishing two blogs within a week of each other going over the same ground, I am instead going to cover what Metal Gear means for me. This might sound like an odd thing to want to talk about, but while it’s true that Ground Zeroes fell short of expectations, it wasn’t for the reasons I was expecting.

This had never been done before...

The first time I owned a Metal Gear game (Metal Gear Solid on the Playstation,) I was fifteen. 3D games were still developing at that point, and while some were good, there were some clangers as well. Metal Gear Solid not only blew most of the 3D games out of the water, it also was the first game I remember outside of RPGs to have a truly memorable plot. Rather than taking you around the world on different missions, it stuck you on Shadow Moses island; one military base to cover the entire game. Characters had complexity and depth, there were betrayals, cover-ups, a reason to unlock both endings, and some clever fourth-wall breaking. Not to mention, Snake was cool. It was one of the few games on the Playstation I played through multiple times.

Snake. The hero we both need AND deserve.

On the Playstation 2, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty was one of the most hyped games. The characters would look better than ever, it would take advantage of the advancing hardware, there was even a demo of it available in Zone of the Enders; it was an exciting time! Then the game came out and, while very few people remember Raiden fondly, the game was very well-designed – even if, you spend a lot of the time listening to the codec. The plot was contrived; I had to go on to Wikipedia to make sense of it, but it was fun to speculate.

Then we got Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. This is a phenomenal game in terms of the camouflage system and survival mechanics. But I didn’t like playing it without the radar anywhere. Snake was still a cool character but I guessed you were playing the character who would eventually become Big Boss – the overarching villain for the original Metal Gear games and who overshadows the Metal Gear Solid franchise. So I had an idea of how the story would work out and wasn’t interested in seeing it. I never got to the end of it.

I missed Guns of the Patriots entirely, as I never had a Playstation 3. From what I understand it wraps up the whole meta-plot of the franchise, though there was still more to explore. But now Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain is out and laced with controversy surrounding Hideo Kojima’s relationship with Konami. If the game wasn’t truly finished and never will be, it’s not a game I have any interest in playing, even if I owned a machine capable of it.

A good game, but not as much as I was expecting...

The first two Metal Gear Solid games still resonate with me to this day because they never forgot they were only games – radars, health packs, fourth wall breaking and the like. I was a teenager when they came out. I’m thirty-two now, and I’m becoming fed up with games where stealth is the central mechanic. Ground Zeroes was a very competently-designed game, but felt less like a Metal Gear game and more like a 3^rd-person action-adventure that could have been any game, really. I had no investment in the characters, no reason to play this at all really beyond wanting to play and beat a relatively short game. This done, I had no interest in playing the other missions, or finding out what it was all about. I’m not saying it should have stuck with the old style; of course it needed to evolve. But it’s become a very different game to the one I enjoyed playing when I was younger.

Backlog Beatdown: Racing in the Street with Street Racer

Street Racer is a game I’d been aware of when it came out in 1994 for the SNES, through the TV show Bad Influence. I played the Playstation port of it a few years later at my mate Matt’s house, and even though I didn’t think it represented the power the Playstation purported to have, I seem to remember having a decent amount of fun with it. I bought it a few weeks ago, again to have a light-hearted game I could pick up and play. Here’s how I got on:

You’d think with a name like Street Racer you’d be racing in streets, but in actual fact you’re rarely doing anything of the sort. It is, in essence, a go-kart racing game filled with wacky characters, colourful backgrounds and useful power-ups. Sounds familiar? Well, it was never going to shake off the inevitable comparisons to Super Mario Kart, but Street Racer does enough of its own thing to provide a different kind of challenge.

Hodja purports to have average stats,
but is a surprisingly difficult opponent.

The racing is decent enough. The tracks are short, but tightly designed with lots of corners and it’s surprisingly challenging to maintain concentration for ten laps. The power-ups consists of Stars (a bonus for collecting the most,) rockets for a ‘boost’ button, dynamite which can send you flying if you’re in possession of it when the timer runs out, and med-kits to heal yourself. My only complaint – and I’m not sure whether this is because I’m playing the game on the PS2, my disc is in quite poor condition or there’s a fault in the game’s code – is that you often get massive frame drops that slow the game right down.

 This being an early PS1 game, analogue controls are not supported here, but the rest of the controls are pretty well laid out, with the one puzzling exception that for some reason you have to press down to reverse. The shoulder buttons are where things get interesting; the top two buttons attack left or right, and the bottom two activate your special moves.

Yes, you have special moves. Each character, along with their base stats, have two of the following: A projectile attack, an attack on both sides, an area-of-effect attack that alters the handling of the rival cars, and a short flight that can carry you over obstacles but slows your car down considerably. Getting to know which character has what moves, and what you can expect if you play with or against them, is part of the learning curve of the game! Getting hit will slow you down, and if you run out of energy the effect is even worse.

The characters themselves are well-designed stereotypical caricatures that rarely happen in games these days (although they seem to be making a comeback now thanks to games like Overwatch and League of Legends.) Frank, for example, is a classic Frankenstein’s monster, Raph is an Italian racing boy, and Biff is an American baseball thug. Their stats are based on Acceleration, Top Speed, Handling and Grip. The latter two struck me as odd, as I thought they would be the same thing, but it made sense about half-way through my playthrough – Handling is how well your car steers, but if you steer for too long your car will spin out. How long this takes to happen depends on your grip.

Surf's fast, but can she handle those corners?

Maybe it’s to do with my playstyle, but I did notice something of an imbalance with the stats, as the faster characters tended to be a lot harder to handle because of the design of the tracks. Raph, for example, has the fastest car in the game and is great for straights, but as most of the tracks are made up almost entirely of heavy corners at which he is useless, he’s not an easy character to play. I tended to play as Frank, who has high acceleration so can get up and go out of the corners, and high grip so I wouldn’t spin out.

The game features three competitions: Bronze, Silver and Gold. The higher the competition, the higher the number and challenge of the tracks. The AI appears to be set up so that there is a pre-determined order everybody will place unless you do something about it, and whoever is in first place will be hard to catch, but somehow it still feels like a race as the AI cars attack each other and you in an effort to win. You get points for your position in the race, but you also get bonus points for hitting the most opponents, having the fastest lap, collecting the most stars etc.

The game also features a ‘Rumble’ mode where you compete to be the last car standing in a circular arena that everybody is trying to push everybody off using their attacks, special moves and dynamite. There is only one arena here and the championship lasts for ten rounds. You’d think it would get boring but actually there is a surprising amount of strategy as the league table takes shape. You won’t win every round, but you can help yourself by knocking out the front-runners first so that they will get the least points at the end. Biff was my go-to character for this one.

The reward for finishing both modes is the same cutscene of the pink rabbit that appears on the box art trying to cross the road and then getting in a car and looking in his wing mirror. Not sure what all that was about. Also, in certain versions of the game there is a ‘Football’ mode, where you play football with the characters in their cars. It wasn’t included in the Playstation version of the game but as I understand it, the mode wasn’t particularly well-handled. It’s certainly not going to impress anyone who plays Rocket League!

In fact, what sets this apart from the other versions of the game (not that I’ve played them!) is the CD-quality soundtrack that was the staple of a lot of early PS1 games. It was a gloriously innocent time of well-written music that complimented the level design but wasn’t necessarily ambient or atmospheric as it tends to be today.

While few would describe this game as excellent, and it will always pale in comparison to Super Mario Kart, I’ve had a lot of fun with Street Racer. It’s a nice little game that I’m glad I didn’t pay any substantial amount of money for, and it’s worth a look if you fancy doing something a little bit different with a racing game. It’s a laugh, but don’t expect a miracle.

Backlog Beatdown: Delivering Sweet Chin Music with WWF War Zone

WWF War Zone is a game that I approached with some curiosity. I’d played the N64 version once and I was rubbish at it. But after that I bought a Playstation and got hooked on to the Smackdown series that later became the WW series that is released on a yearly basis even to this very day, and never looked back. Having a different development team brought a very different approach to 3D Wrestling games. War Zone’s controls were complex and fiddly, Smackdown’s were fast and arcade-y. War Zone was more strategic, Smackdown was more spectacular. Both developments created what were regarded at their time to be great games – but as I went down the Smackdown route originally, I was very interested to see what Acclaim’s development brought to the table.

Unless they are deliberately designed to be otherwise, Wrestling games are very much “of their time” in terms of their character roster, and the available characters here would raise a smile for anyone old enough to remember the start of the so-called ‘Attitude’ era. Stone Cold Steve Austin was the poster boy for it, along with Triple H, The Rock (still Rocky Mavia at this point,) Kane, The Undertaker and Mankind.

Oddly enough, Bret Hart was also a playable character in the game. Presumably his involvement in the development (some live-action promos from each wrestler were filmed for the Playstation version) occurred before the Montreal Screwjob. But since the game was released almost a year later when he would have been under contract with WCW, one might reasonably wonder just how long it took Acclaim to make this game!

Stunner! Who hasn't tried this on a
younger sibling at some point?

The wrestling was interesting beyond the basic punches, kicks and blocks. There were beat-em-up style input commands for some of the basic throws, which isn’t surprising since Acclaim were also responsible for the early Mortal Kombat games. You could pause the game to bring up your moves list, and work to that. But getting your opponent in a tie-up was where things got interesting, as your move was more likely to succeed or fail depending on the circumstances. In essence, the player who did the weaker move would win the tie-up against the player who did the stronger move, with the idea being that the weaker move would be less damaging but easier to pull off against a stronger move that would be more likely to be interrupted. But this would change depending on how much momentum your wrestler had built up; if you went into your grapple with full momentum or while your opponent was stunned, there would be no stopping you no matter what move you were trying to do! This worked great against the computer but I would imagine cause disparity between players of differing levels of experience; if you know how to do all of one character’s moves, it would put you at a distinct advantage against someone picking up the game for the first time.

I chose Shawn Michaels for my playthrough. The Championship mode was simple enough; defeat a succession of Wrestlers to become the World Champion at the top of the ‘tree.’ I think there were some other stipulations; you couldn’t lose more than three matches. Also, sometimes a previously-defeated opponent would challenge you to a ‘grudge’ match, and if you lost this one you’d drop a whole step off the ladder. Nothing a bit of scum-saving doesn’t sort out!

You would think that it would be the finishing moves that decided the outcome of the match, but they’re very tricky to do, requiring a longer-than-usual input command. I managed Shawn Michaels’ Sweet Chin Music a few times, but I often found that trying to do the move left me open to an attack at a time when I couldn’t afford to lose health needlessly. I found it a far more effective tactic to get the opponent’s health down to red and learn the command for Crucifixion – a pin that can be done from the standing position. That won me a lot more matches – and the Championship – than any mount of faffing about with complicated finishers!

Having now won the World Championship and been rewarded with a pretty standard cutscene, I’m ready to move on. I know the game has more to offer but it’s basically an unlock-fest from this point, and while War Zone is a good game, I don’t necessarily feel the need to play through it multiple times to unlock all the costumes and wrestlers. I might think about coming back to it later, though – there are wrestlers in this game that didn’t appear in the later games, so War Zone might be the only opportunity I have to play as Ahmed Johnson, or British Bulldog. Until then, I’ll move on to another game and see what new challenges await…

Backlog Beatdown: Destroying Cars with Destruction Derby 2

There were no shortage of racing games on the PS1, and Destruction Derby 2 was one of the ones that everybody had played at some point. It must have been something of a bold venture at the time, as racing games that had destructible cars as their main gameplay mechanic were almost unheard of. Yes, there were games where the cars could take damage, but not necessarily games where that was the whole point of the game!

Destruction Derby 2 is a racing game which follows a pretty straight formula of drive around a track and attempt to reach first place. If this was all there were to it, the game wouldn’t be much good. The graphics are OK for the time but the limited draw distance results in a lot of ‘pop-in’ on certain tracks. There is limited commentary that gets old quite quickly, and this game was released before analogue controls were standardised so it’s not that easy to control your cars effectively.

What sets this apart from the other racing games of the time is that it’s less about your race position and more about how many points you can get by causing your opponents to spin. If you collide with your opponent and cause them to spin 90 degrees, you get ten points. If you cause them to spin one 180 degrees, or force them to retire from the race, you get 25 points, and if you manage to get them to spin all the way around you get 50. Your points and those of your 19 opponents are totalled up at the end of the race – along with 50, 25 and 10 points available for 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd positions respectively – and the driver with the most points is the winner. The Championship mode involves four seasons of four races plus a ‘Destruction Derby’ mode at the end of each race where the cars all drive at each other in a coliseum-like setting and see who lasts the longest, and the idea is to get promoted to the top division and win the Championship.

Definitely the car to choose if you want to win...

It was a good idea, but it wasn’t terribly well-executed. Scoring points for the race by crashing in to other cars was fun when it worked, but more often than not it didn’t; sometimes the car wouldn’t spin, sometimes I’d clip straight through the car altogether. And let’s not pretend that the few times I did manage it weren’t more by luck than by judgement. The Destruction Derby levels were a lottery based on how many cars had already been knocked out of the race by the time you get a chance to score. And because you have to be hitting the cars at a certain speed to get them to spin at all, the only car to choose out of the three that are available is the Pro car – maximum speed, minimum control. The only reason I made it through the third season is that I was fortunate enough to score something like 400 points on the first race; to this day I still don’t know how I managed that.

I did eventually manage to beat the game but with such an inconsistent scoring method, the only way I could do it was to scum-save the game between each race when I got a relatively decent score. Somehow I’m taking up 5 blocks on the memory card with a one-block game!

There was a “Stock Car Racing” mode – a mode where the score is based on your position and nothing else – but I didn’t bother with that. Destruction Derby 2 doesn’t handle well enough to get much fun out of it as a racing simulation, and there are far better games out there for the purpose.

I probably sound quite negative about this game but the truth is that I did enjoy my experience with it. I learned little tricks and quirks of each track to help my progress, which gave me a sense of achievement. Actually making it to the finish line was always nice, and never a guarantee. And props to the soundtrack of grind-y Nu-Metal, which was very much of-it’s-time and leaves me in a nostalgic haze.

Backlog Beatdown: Saving my Bacon with Hogs of War

So Ebay may very well become my downfall in managing my video game backlog. I’ve been ordering all sorts of titles mainly for the PS1, inspired by the game collector and Youtube star MetalJesusRocks. I’ve bought around 15 games so far and I’ve been having a tonne of fun with the ones I’ve played, most of which I’ve previously owned at some point and it’s leaving me in a nostalgic haze.

And what a delight it was to play Hogs of War again…

The idea was best summarised by the Playstation Magazine Demo Disc it appeared on: “Imagine Worms in 3D. Now put pigs where the worms should be, and…” It is a turn-based tactics game in which you control a squad of usually five pigs. They have a limited amount of time to move around and position themselves to attack the enemy, as almost all the attacks are done from a stationary position. The hogs have a certain amount of health each, which is drained with each attack it takes, and the last team standing is the winner.

I had War Pigs by Black Sabbath going round in my
head all the way through my playthrough of this.

Much of the strategy of the game comes from choosing where to put your pigs and deciding what weapon to use. The sniper rifle, for example, does as much damage as a direct hit from a bazooka, however it can only fire in a straight line and leaves you open to a follow-up attack if you don’t kill your enemy straight away and are in an awkward position. The bazooka has area-of-effect damage and can be fired over terrain, but requires you to ‘charge’ your attack to the appropriate amount of power you need for the shot; if you don’t get this right your accuracy will suffer and you’ll very likely miss your shot entirely. Deciding what to use, when to use it, and where to use it from is the key to getting through some of the harder levels of the game.

The game has a campaign mode, where it puts you in a linear series of 25 levels taking over the continent of Saustralasia. Your hogs are somewhat limited in what they can do at first, but you gain ‘medals’ throughout the game as rewards for completing levels and surviving, and you use these to upgrade your pigs. You can take them down a Heavy Weapons route, or Espionage, Engineering and Medic. You can choose them to suit your play style if you want, but you’ll find it much easier to have two of each (you start with a total of 8 hogs) and swap them in and out of your squad as you need to. A fourth promotion brings them up to Commando level, which specialises in all weapons, and the final level is Hero, who can use more or less all weapons and has a few special ones to work with as well.

The true strength of this game is its sense of humour. Your team of pigs is selected from one of 6 ‘Nations,’ very stereotypically based on the English, French, German, American, Russian and Japanese. They all make amusing and borderline-racist remarks when they make their attack in hilariously overblown accents. Plus the cut-scenes, usually “Training” videos, are funny in their uselessness. The whole thing is capped off by having many of the voice-overs done by the sadly-missed Rik Mayall, whose performance brings the cheesy lines and camp over-acting to life.

The game challenges me at the right level; it’s tough enough in places but the campaign took me around 15 hours to get all the way through and that’s quite enough for me. The AI sometimes makes some very strange decisions indeed, and the controls feel clunky – I suspect this was a quite deliberate design decision that adds to the feel of the game. After all, guns are hard enough to use at the best of times, never mind trying to do it with trotters!

I love this game; I regretted selling it years ago and I’ll certainly be hanging on to it for a good long while this time. Maybe I’m getting old, but I found myself thinking around half-way through my play-through that we just don’t get this kind of game in the mainstream these days. Turn-based strategy games are still something of a niche, and in a Triple-A release, the edgy dialogue would be focus-tested out of the game before you’d even got on to Rik Mayall’s booking agent. Plus, it’s fighting pigs; not relatable in any obvious way (though the game has a surprising amount to say about the futility of war!) and a ridiculous concept. You won’t see this on any Youtube advertisement, and if people still make games like this, then they are consigned to the depths of what is now called Indie Gaming. A bit sad, really.

*EDIT*

Chances are some of you may now be thinking: "Well, this seems pretty good, I'll give it a go." If you do, be advised the PC version of this has slightly better graphics and is inferior in all other respects. The main problem with it is that the enemy pigs don't move, they just stand and fire. This is not a bug but was deliberately coded into the game, and I'd like to find out why, because it should be coded out again with extreme force. It removes any challenge from the game and you're basically just playing a shooting gallery. Get it for the PlayStation, or the handhelds if you can.

Backlog Beatdown: Blowing stuff up with Ace Combat: Assault Horizon

How I came to own Ace Combat: Assault Horizon was a bit of a weird one. I first became aware of it watching Angry Joe’s review of it; this was so long ago that I couldn’t remember the score but it I remember thinking at the time it looked pretty good. I hadn’t played a flight sim/combat game for a long, long time – not since the original Air Combat on the Playstation, and since that game was released before analogue controls were standard, it didn’t handle all that well. But I happened to see a copy of it in Dudley Market, remembered the review, and because I fancied something a little different play decided to pick it up and give it a go.

Playing it, I actually found it to be pretty good. You play as a number of Ace Combat fighters – a fighter, a bomber and a helicopter pilot at various stages of the game. While some of these sections are handled better than others – Turret sections are rarely welcome, for example – the game is generally very good, challenging and varied enough so that it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

I had to get rid of the cockpit view as it just got in the way.
How actual pilots cope with it I don't know.

I am aware that this is part of a long-running series and that Assault Horizon was an attempt to give it a more ‘Arcade’-y feel. The chief innovation in this game was the ‘Dogfight’ mode, which you could initiate if you got close enough to your enemy. As I understand it, the idea is that it’s very difficult to deal with enemy planes up close and personal means that quite a lot of the combat is done at a range. Dogfight mode attempts to rectify this; If you get close and press LB+RB, the camera zooms in on the plane you’re following and you have to keep your missile lock on him long enough to fire one. It essentially becomes an on-rails shooter at this point, and gives the game a somewhat cinematic feel, although you quite quickly recognise where it’s used to set up the set pieces in the scenery.

There is a certain strategic element to this, as you have to pick your spots carefully. The Dogfight mode is designed to make the fights with the more skilled pilots less of a slug-fest – and if your objective is timed, using it takes up time you don’t have. It’s therefore wise not to do it with everything, and try to take some of the smaller planes out with your regular missiles. Recognising when to do Dogfight Mode and when not to is the key to beating the harder levels.

The helicopter missions have been criticised for being rubbish but I actually quite liked the change of pace. This also had a certain strategic element to it. Your missions were rarely timed but it was good to plan your approach, as taking on too many targets at once would rarely end well. It also made flying through terrain a challenge, as the enemy missiles would get you easily if you fly too high. Then again I really enjoyed Desert Strike when I was a kid…

The Bomber missions serve mainly as another change of pace; glorified turret sections and skilled piloting segments would probably not be too much fun by themselves but it balances nicely into the whole single-player campaign.

As for the campaign itself, I don’t play many modern military games, but if I did, I expect they would look a lot like this. An antagonist – not American, who knew – is using a new type of super-destructive missile and it is your job to stop it. The story segments are reasonably-well voice-acted, apart from the lead character who’s a bit of an everyman. The character you remember is Gutz, your wingman, simply because his absolute refusal to take anything seriously makes him the most memorable character.

Now that I’ve finished the campaign, I think I’m done with Assault Horizon. It would be nice to be able to play it in multiplayer but no one’s playing it right now. I might come back and play a harder difficulty if I feel so inclined, but the game was as long as it needed to be and it’s time to move on.