alien129's Full Review: Ace Combat 2 for PlayStation 1
Now everyone should remember Ace Combat/Air Combat. It was one of the first titles released on the PlayStation, and it was not only a good showcase for the machine's potential, but also a pretty enjoyable game. And its sequel, Ace Combat 2, is, well, prety much what you expect of it, but not a whole lot more than that.
Namco has chosen realism over arcade-shooting action, making this game even more of a flight-sim than its predecessor. On the good side of this, you get a huge 3D landscape you can fly over at will during each mission, a generous selection of aircraft both friendly and enemy that are nearly indistinguishable from their Real-Life counterparts. On the bad side, well, there really isn't much excitement in flying up to an enemy plane and waiting a few seconds for your missiles to lock before you can blow him up and move on to the next one. And forget about trying to use the machine-gun on them -- you'll get old and die and be just a skeleton sitting there with a PS controller in your hands before just one bullet hits its mark. And, oddly enough, even the weakest enemy target takes a good two or three missile hits to finally die -- making your machinegun even more useless.
The graphics are generally good, with very slick intro screens, and as I mentioned earlier, very realistic, and generally nice-looking aircraft. if you ever get close enough to see your enemies as more than just a dark pixel or two framed by a little box on your HUD. The scenery is okay, but doesn't start to get interesting till the third mission, where you get to fly over/through a little port town complete with high-rises and lots of anti-aircraft guns on a mission to sink an aircraft carrier with your puny little missiles. The music was definitely designed to appeal to the armchair fighter-jock who's seen Top Gun just a few too many times. It's not bad, but it gets annoying after a while.
And now, a note about control. Namco has let the high controlling standards of their previous games slip, unfortunately. Though AC2 supports Sony's new analog controller, the dual flightstick, *and* the NeGcon, none of these appear to work any better than the standard thumbpad. And that is a shame really, because while you could be enjoying the game, you spend much more time crashing into the scenery, stalling out, and generally wondering if you are flying your aircraft or if it is flying you. In the meantime, your enemies have no trouble with their aircraft, and no mercy for a hapless rookie like yourself.
The bottom line: This SHOULD have been a lot better, and its ended up as the first Namco title I played without instantly loving it. Still, it does have good qualities to go along with the bad, and for those of you who are too impatient to wait for the US release, this one's already all in English--even the voice-overs, just with Japanese subtitles. Definitely a try-before-you-buy situation.
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