Dancing with Angels

Flight simulators generally come in one of two breeds - the pure simulator (ala “Microsoft Flight Simulator”) where the planes perform true-to-life, or the arcade variety, where the planes are little more than cool tools to blow stuff up. Which of these two flags a game flies determine its overall characteristics, and what a gamer should expect. “Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation” for Xbox 360 is a game that (mostly) successfully attempts to bridge the gap between these two polar sub-genres.

You take on the role of “Talisman,” an ace pilot in the Emmerian military. On a calm spring day, the capital of Emmeria, Gracemeria, is attacked by the Republic of Estovakia. It is your job (being the super-soldier ace pilot you are) to take them all out and regain control of Emmeria.

“Ace Combat 6” is all about aerial warfare, and reach for the skies it does. The campaign features near-endless tutorials (trust me, you’ll need them) and fifteen barrel-blazin’ missile-launchin’ bomb-droppin’ missions with enough explosions to rattle your windows (and definitely bother your neighbors).

But truly engaging dogfights would lose appeal if not visually impressive. For 95% of the game, “Ace Combat 6” delivers outrageous eye-candy. The framerate is rock solid and very rarely gets bogged down. Clouds and smoke effects are fantastic, and flying really looks like flying thanks to actual satellite imagery, gorgeous terrain, and impressive atmospheric haze and particle effects. A couple of the missions even featured detailed cityscapes and villages - with one catch. Most of the skyscrapers and larger buildings feature full-3D models, but the smaller, more-mundane buildings are flat Google Earth-style textures. It looks sweet from 2000 feet, but drop below 1000 and the lower-quality ground and building textures become readily apparent.

As for the planes themselves, well, they steal the show. ”Ace Combat 6” is a licensed product of Boeing, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman, among others. Aircraft are meticulously detailed and feature realistic control surface motion, and cockpits with working gauges and heads-up-displays. They handle as you would expect them to - flying the A-10 is like flying a bulldozer and the F-22 is a neck-snapping thrill ride. All of the simulation-quality details are fleshed out including vapor cones off the wings and afterburner trails (with the correct number of mach disks, of course).

The end of every mission features a full-level replay, with cinematic-quality camera effects, angles, and music. All those wobbling turns and frenetic fighting fade into what looks like “Top Gun 2,” a polished and entertaining way to watch yourself wipe the map clean of Estovakians. And, much like “Halo 3,” you can save the replay to the Xbox 360’s hard drive and show your friends. Honestly, I found it to be a well-polished yet gimmicky feature, cool but mostly worthless.

Jets screaming, missiles exploding, bombs falling - “Ace Combat 6” roars in any room. The designers obviously understood the importance of quality sound. Unfortunately, they didn’t understand balance, as the game does not have its optimum sound settings set from the get-go. I found that when I turned down the voices a lot and music a little and really let the afterburners loose, it made the game waaay better.

Between each mission the player is “treated” to a cut-scene that, regrettably, is no more than a melodramatic mess that attempts to make the kiddy-pool-shallow storyline into a diving well of human-interest. Please. These are bad, bad, bad. The voice acting is atrocious - the Estovakians have stereotypical eastern-European accents and the other characters all seem to have perpetual colds or serious cases of depression…I couldn’t tell which. The storyline itself is laughable - it gives no time reference (is this a conflict that lasts days or months or years?), follows irrelevant and uninteresting caricatures of war-stricken folk, and force-feeds the idea that all wars are really “brothers fighting brothers.” Yuck. Counter to the gritty realism of “Call of Duty’s” cut-scenes and storyline, “Ace Combat 6’s” featurettes are unpolished junk out of some hippy’s diary. The characters in the cut-scenes are fond of calling jets “angels,” and even more fond of telling each other to “go dance with the angels.” To me, that sounds like a rather polite way of verbally flipping someone the bird, but to them is a term of endearment. The phrase is grating and fanatically over-used; it’s uttered at least once a cut-scene. (Ironically, this fall’s “Bioshock” featured the same phrase, but it fits in that game’s allegorical parable. In this one, it’s awful.)

“Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation” is a mixed bag. On one hand, the game has all of the makings of a blockbuster - killer graphics, sound, and authentic (and licensed) aircraft. On the other, it has perhaps the worst story to come out of Videogameland since “The Krion Conquest,” so bad, in fact, that it detracts from the legitimately brilliant aspects of the game. That being said, “Ace Combat 6” is an entertaining way to take to the skies and satisfy your inner ace, all without having to don a jumpsuit.