Category: Platform

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Game Ramblings #81 – Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown

More Info from Bandai Namco

  • Genre: Arcade Flight Sim
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, Windows

TL;DR

  • Really entertaining arcade flight sim with solid combat mechanics
  • Gorgeous visuals that are a huge step up since the last main entry
  • Expansive skill tree / equipment tree gives a bit more variety and depth to the game’s upgrade path

It’s been too long.

Seriously though, Ace Combat 6 came out in 2007. There was a PS3 spinoff, some really weird free to play stuff, and a decent PSP title, but nothing in the main line for over a decade. I’ve always really loved this series, and from where I’m sitting writing this I can see the PS2 entries lined up, so I had every digit crossed hoping this game was going to be a great return to form for the series. I’m happy to report that it more than lives up to the quality of the series’ past.


That tweet does more than about anything I can do to explain how gorgeous and exciting it is to simply fly around in Ace 7. The controls are as fluid as they’ve ever been. It simply feels easy to fly around, which is really nice because it allows you to focus on everything else going on. This being an Unreal Engine 4 title though, it comes with some real nice bells and whistles. Diving into clouds is simply breathtaking. Water hits your camera, your vision goes away, and it really feels like you might just get lost. Dive into a thunderstorm like I did up there and you’re in for even more fun surprises if you manage to get hit by lightning.

Combat is still largely what it has been in past titles. Deck out your planes in an assortment of missiles and bombs. If it’s a sea-based mission, maybe setup some air-to-ship weaponry. If you’re diving around through canyons, maybe use some seeking bombs for ground targets. The ease of controls just make it all super accessible. Flying is on your stick, throttle is on your shoulders, and weapons are all on your face buttons. This leaves you always on the right buttons when in a dog fight, and boy do those deliver.

It’s not always going to be small planes you’re up against. There’s definitely larger things to destroy.

This game is a relatively modern take on combat, and weaves a story around the transition between pilot-based combat and drone-based combat, along with the implications of this if the drones are able to operate independently on their own. This leaves a lot of room for drone movement to lean well into the fantastic, and give you dog fights that are well outside the norm. While you’re weaving and bobbing, the drones are sometimes literally running circles around you. The fights become a lot more opportunistic in the past for when you can actually launch missiles or machine gun fire that have a chance to hit, but this all feels pretty fair. There’s still a lot of skill in managing to avoid being attacked, particularly since there’s a lot more room for the drones to come in behind you quickly, and you have to be a lot more on the ball for activating your attacks in really small windows of time to get hit your target. Overall while it felt very familiar, it was definitely a new experience in a lot of ways having to be so quick to react.

The aircraft tree is your new way to buy planes and upgrades, and it’s pretty significant.

It’s also worth mentioning how much I enjoyed the equipment upgrade path that Ace 7 brought in. Past games have always had the ability to buy new planes, but this one goes full RPG and brings in a skill tree. The various branches of the tree have planes and weapons in them, but they also have upgrade tokens that can be purchased. At plane loadout time, these tokens can then be added to your plane via a point-cap system to modify the plane to your liking. Want tighter yaw to really push through turns? Lean into maneuverability upgrades. Frustrated by how slow some of the special weapons reload? Lean into upgrades that improve reload speed. Because they’re point capped, you can’t necessarily build some uber broken plane, but this whole system provides a really nice way to just generally get upgrades as well as provide some nice customization to your planes if you really find one that you like.

Flying is fun right from the start, and it’s never looked better for the series.

Realistically this game isn’t for everyone. End of the day it’s a game about flying and shooting, so it’s gonna hit a limited market. However, it’s the kind of pure joyous action that I always get a kick out of, and never really understood why more games like it weren’t available. Having been 12 years since the last main entry, I’m glad that Ace Combat is finally getting another chance to shine because this is a damn good entry in the series, and finally one that pretty much everyone will have access to play.

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Game Ramblings #80 – Shadow of the Tomb Raider

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, Windows, macOS, Linux

TL;DR

  • Consistently good combat, exploration, and puzzle solving
  • Entertaining story involving the legend of the city of Paititi and a mix of Inca and Maya lore
  • On console, nice option to prefer framerate over visual quality. 60 FPS feels really good during the heavy movement segments of the game.

If you’ve played the prior two games in this trilogy, you know what to expect – solid semi-open world exploration, good puzzle dungeons, excellent stealth mechanics, and fun combat when pressed into action. Although this is definitely starting to trend towards being formulaic, there’s a few things here that made this feel like the best iteration on the gameplay that’s come out of the trilogy.

The game is only really a semi-open world experience, but the handful of larger towns are still fun to explore.

One of the reasons that I’ve really enjoyed this trilogy is that it’s only really openish. It’s got some open world trappings in terms of a relatively seamless world and a ton of things to collect in it, but in general this is still a fairly linear experience. The handful of times you get an open-style area, it’s really to allow you to breath between strictly linear story segments and give you a place to return to when a story spot is complete. These larger areas also give you the push to explore to find tombs – after all this IS Tomb Raider – that act as a significant side item to do.

The tombs are the best part of the game, giving you a mix of puzzle areas to engage in.

The prior titles in the reboot series had their share of tombs to go into, but it never really felt like a focus. While the content here is still entirely optional, the quality and count of tombs available in this game feels more significant than before. Its these tombs and crypts that are the best part of the game for me, and pushed me to seem them out whenever I could.

Each open area typically has somewhere between 3-6 hidden areas to explore with a single focus in each one. Some tombs are focused on manipulation of light to open doors to proceed further. Some focus on weight-based puzzles to open up paths to move on. A couple of them really end up being purely about climbing from point A to B without dying. These are entirely optional experience, but they’re worth seeking out simply because they are so much fun to complete. On their own, you could make a game out of a series of these and it would be worth playing, but as a part of the greater experience they still stand out. It also helps that they tend to have skill rewards at the end to really push the need to complete them.

I’m a sucker for stealth games and bow + arrow games, and this gives me both in great supply.

Combat remains largely the same as previous iterations, but is still a ton of fun. That said, the fact that there is less of it throughout the game oddly makes it feel even better. The previous titles had similar problems to Uncharted where almost any story area had obvious segments of a room of bad guys, then a room of jumping, then a room of bad guys, etc. Shadow significantly reduces this, and the game really only ends up having a handful of significant combat events in the entire game. Of this, most of them can also be completed entirely through strong stealth mechanics. When you do end up firing weapons, it’s usually for a strong story-reason, and luckily the handful of weapons (pistol, shotgun, auto rifle, and in particular the bow) all feel solid to fire.

Overall, Shadow felt like an appropriate ending to the reboot trilogy, and probably a good ending for the series on the current generation of hardware. There’s some obvious fluff to the experience that could be trimmed away, particularly with side quests that generally involve running around towns doing nothing in particular, but the overall game feels like it has reached a solid peak. Combat is fun, the puzzle solving is the best it’s been, and the origin story for Lara wrapped up in a relatively satisfying way. I’m hoping the next generation of hardware allows the series to stretch into new directions in a way similar to God of War, but for now I’m happy in where this one has ended up and can’t wait to see where Lara’s adventures take us next.

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Game Ramblings #79 – Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

More Info from Ninja Theory

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Windows, Xbox One

TL;DR

  • Fantastic storytelling backed by a phenomenally good audio design
  • Combat is the obvious weakpoint for the game – it’s serviceable, but nothing special. Also not a reason to avoid the game.

Hellblade is a curious game to recommend. It’s technically an action game, but its action is not a reason to play it. It’s purposefully AAA in quality, but not in scope so it doesn’t wear out its welcome. It’s also the rare game that I would highly recommend wearing ONLY headphones for, even if you’ve got a high end audio system purely based on the merits of its audio design. It’s proof that a high focus on a specific element can result in an extremely high quality title without the need to add unnecessary fluff to pad the experience.

The game is entirely based around Senua’s psychosis, and everything from the audio to world design focuses in on that.

I’m really regretting not pulling some video footage of the game’s audio design while I was playing, because that’s where I want to start here. Up in the TL;DR I mentioned that this game is worth playing with headphones, and it’s entirely because of the focus on Senua’s psychosis. Throughout the game, the player hears voices in Senua’s head that act as something of a narration. In a lot of ways, it’s similar to the narration that takes place in the game Bastion, but in this case is often telling the player the opposite of what they want to do. These voices are entirely spatialized, so you spend a lot of the game with voices floating around inside your hearing. It’s a simple audio trick, but it’s fantastically impressive in practice, and one of the few true good uses of stereo panning of audio that I’ve heard in a game in recent years.

The fact that you can’t see anything in this screenshot is very much on purpose – it’s the mechanic of an entire level.

The heavy emphasis on audio even becomes game mechanics on its own. One of the puzzle segments of the game from the screenshot above involves effectively removing the player’s vision. The entire level takes place in near blackness, with only things directly next to the player even being visible as a fog. Throughout this entire section of the game, the player depends on their sense of hearing, and to some extent sense of touch through controller vibration to get through the game. Within the context of the game’s story at this point, it’s a fantastic way to force the player into an uncomfortable position where they can’t depend on what they see to give them clues of where to go. Everything comes down to your ability to listen to what’s going on, and move towards the sounds that can lead you to the exit.

These kinds of use of strong technology also abound in how puzzles are solved. The little video above is one example in how they manipulate the environment through the use of portals to open up progress to the player. There’s a few variations of this type of mechanic around, and it plays a really nice balance between making the player pay close attention to what they are looking at without being a vague guessing game.

Combat was clearly not an emphasis, but the bosses themselves are still a lot of fun to face.

If there’s anything where the game could have used more time, it’s probably in combat. The combat that is there is effective, but it’s pretty simple and has its own share of problems that grow as the game nears its end. This game has the problem that I’ve seen in a lot of melee games where the combat is fun against one or two tough enemies, but not fun with a bunch of weak enemies. The sections with weak enemies near the end of the game end up being an effective dodge spam to avoid a bunch of attacks, then poke damage to kill the enemies. There’s never much danger from the enemies themselves but I ended up dying a few times simply from getting stuck in chains or other environment pieces that seemed like they weren’t really meant to be hazards.

That said, the simple nature of the combat does shine in boss fights. The handful of bosses have a pretty wide range in sizes and mechanics, so they end up being the satisfying nearly Souls-style fights, where you slowly face off against the boss to learn its mechanics, minimize damage, then really go on the attack as you learn the patterns. Because many of the boss attacks are one or two shot deaths, finishing off the bosses is always really satisfying due to the recognition that the difference between you winning and you dying was really down to skill.

Ultimately this is a game that is really easy to recommend. Just on its gameplay and story alone, it’s probably worth the look for a lot of people. It’s a relatively short game that takes place as a single continuous camera shot (about 6-8 hours in general) and will come in at an affordable price at this point. However, the audio design is above and beyond what almost any developer is doing at any level these days, so on that alone I give it a nod. Now that Ninja Theory is under the Microsoft umbrella, I’m hoping we see more experiences like this where a strong focus wins out over marketing bullet points.