Mission-based flight games are a classic genre, home to celebrated games such as the X-Wing and TIE Fighter titles of the 90s and many others that entertained players by letting them loose in a large battlefield and giving them a mix of dogfighting action and special conditions to meet (destroy this target, escort that battleship, etc.). While I’m not deeply familiar with the Ace Combat series, I’ve poked at a few for long enough to understand how they basically play and was curious to see what this latest installment would be like. I found something completely unexpected: A mission-based flight game that had most of Ace Combat’s basic mechanics intact, but replaced much of the rest of it with things taken from current FPS titles. Doing this has no doubt made Assault Horizon easier for most players to get involved with, though the hardcore fans may be annoyed.
Set in the modern world in roughly the present day, Assault Horizon puts you in control of a variety of aircraft. Jet fighters are the most common, but you’ll be spending time in helicopter gunships and even the heavily armed AC-130. You’re the pilot and gunner most of the time, chasing down enemies while ensuring certain mission goals are met, but other stages are essentially ’turret gunner stages’ like you might see in other genres; the craft’s route is fixed and you get to shoot whatever you’re told to hit. One of the more obvious FPS elements used in Assault Horizon is regenerating health, as your displays become dark red as you take more damage but it will eventually fade if you avoid any further hits. You also have no shortage of firepower, as most of your craft hold dozens or hundreds of missiles and will be facing suitably large groups of enemies, usually in waves.
While the inclusion of so many real aircraft might seem daunting, Assault Horizon makes them all easy to fly. It’s not totally arcade style since things like slowing down to improve your turning radius are important but so is avoiding falling below your stall speed, but the flight controls are for the most part extremely easy to understand and the player won’t need tons of experience with flight sims to enjoy this. Though general flight combat is included, a new ’Dogfight Mode’ or ’DFM’ has been added. Players can chase an enemy down and press RB plus LB to enter the Dogfight once sufficiently close, putting you into a sort of automatic pursuit; you will generally stay on your enemy’s tail so long as you keep the plane pointed in their general direction. Enemy squad leaders and aces seem to outright require using DFM, as they’re otherwise nearly impossible to deal with.
Another unusual twist is that Assault Horizon uses the same sort of storytelling methods that recent FPS games have. Your character paces around during cutscenes and you have camera control of where they look, and both cutscenes and mission events will have little ’QuickTime Events’ where you have to press a button at the right time to do something. While this is certainly a departure from how Ace Combat games normally tell their stories, it’s effective and allows for very strong cinematic moments to unfold at any time so players will need to pay attention. The story itself is fairly straightforward, involving a modern military operation against rebel forces eventually revealing a much more sinister plot about stopping weapons of mass destruction. Most of the characters are straight out of any fairly modern ’air war’ movie, but they are acceptable for what they are.
