Today is a rare day in BLAEO history: my amount of beaten games is the opposite of the number of my unplayed games!

EDIT: Nevermind, that was before I beat this game.

• Ass Combat: Assault Horizon
  

  7 hours playtime

  29 of 50 achievements

This is a flight-combat game. You have your standard “down tilts you up and vice versa” along with constant forward motion that you merely adjust the speed of, but unlike RaidersSphere 4th, holding left/right actually turns you left/right, so this is less of a simulator than other flight-combat games. In fact, this game doesn’t make you rely on that unreliable method of shooting missiles at other planes when you’re “locked on”; instead, if you fly close enough to the back of an enemy plane, you can push both the left and right bumpers at once to enter a close combat mode. Here, your plane will more-or-less automatically follow the enemy’s plane (you still have to steer and keep an eye on your acceleration or else the enemy will break away), and all you have to do is keep the targeting reticle over the plane long enough to charge a more accurate homing missile. Personally, I really like this new mechanic since it puts that whole “hitting enemy planes” thing into something the player has actual control over instead of the coin-toss that it was in RaidersSphere 4th. There’s even a bit of a difficulty curve with later planes taking more drastic evasion methods and even getting behind you and putting you in their close combat mode, at which point you have to slow down and wait for a reversal icon to show up so you can turn the tables.

Of course, if you’re familiar with my posts yet still continue to read them, you’re probably wondering what issues you’ll need to look out for if you play the game, and this game does have its fair share of problems. Notably, the game likes to shift the camera’s focus away from you in order to zoom in on a recently-destroyed target enemy for a couple seconds. You never have to worry about crashing when the game does this since your plane is always stabilized, regardless of whatever trajectory you were in when the enemy was destroyed. In fact, this wouldn’t really be much of an issue at all if it weren’t for the game’s tendency to place enemy planes right next to the mission border: I once shot down the final enemy in the wave (right before it transitioned to the next part of the mission), and when the camera finally cut back to me, my plane had flown out of the mission area and triggered a fail-state. Honestly, for a genre with no level design, this game has some mediocre level design. How hard can it be to copy/paste some more brown hills to the other side of the base so that the mission area border can be extended? Heck, why have mission areas at all? Just loop the terrain! It’s not like there are any landmarks that would meaningfully alter how players approach the mission objective, i.e. level design. Or heck, just do what Starfox 64 does and have the plane make an automatic U-turn at the border!

However, my biggest issue with the game is its overall lack of communication to the player. Sometimes, you can shoot down a non-leader target in one or two missiles, while other times, they take several hits and still keep flying (EDIT: for reference, every target in RaidersSphere 4th would die in just two missiles, with the exception of the final boss). The same goes for your own plane: sometimes, you lose in just a couple hits, while other times, it seems like your plane takes quite a bit of abuse and still flies. Also, as much as I like the idea of the close combat mode, it suffers from the same thing: sometimes, a plane will take a turn so sharp that it goes off-screen, and you still keep up with it even though you were holding the stick in the wrong direction; other times, the enemy plane is right there, and even though you’re turning with it, it breaks off anyway. However, the worst example of this is when you’re in an enemy’s close combat mode: I’m pretty darn sure I kept my plane outside of the red targeting reticles but still took direct machine-gun fire and missile damage. Half (maybe even all) of these problems could be alleviated if the game had better ways to communicate what’s going on, but the game never explains how to avoid attacks if an enemy traps you in its close combat zone; it never lets you know if an enemy broke away from your close combat because of your speed or your movement or what; it never shows enemy HP–it never even shows your HP, and heck, it doesn’t even let you know what your minimum speed before stalling is! I’d always heard that games were trying to be more movie-like, but this is the first time outside of an RPG where I felt like the mechanics were only there to give the feeling of being skilled rather than actually testing your skill. This is especially true for the final boss, where it seems like the boss has infinite health until all the scripted sequences are done with. Call me a conspiracy nut, but why else would it mask those details if it wasn’t secretly changing stuff behind the scenes? Maybe deep down, the game really is skill-based, but it’s hard to say because of the game’s lack of feedback…or maybe I’m just not a fan of the genre–who knows?

The game also likes to throw in gimmicky play mechanics that never show up for more than two or three missions. The helicopter missions actually have free movement (so you can come to a complete stop without stalling) with most of the targets being stationary or slow-moving ground targets. Machine gun fire can be dodged by strafing, and missiles are dodged by pressing both bumpers when the reversal icon displays on screen (though two of the reversal-icon’s three frames are tiny and the whole thing is rather hard to see). Also, the right bumper is used for firing your limited-ammo, non-guided missiles, so it can be a little annoying for them to go off when you just want to dodge the missile. Luckily, your own machine gun isn’t totally useless against the enemies you’re put up against (unlike in the airplane missions), especially since your zoom is a more reliable method of locking onto enemies than what the game actually calls its lock-on mechanic. The only real exception is when the game makes you fight other copters: it takes way too long to kill them with the machine gun, and it’s really difficult to hit them with the missiles (even when they’re basically at a standstill). Oh, and one more detail to file under the game’s lack of communication: late in the second chopper mission, you’re told to stay “below the buildings” to avoid the enemy’s radar, but a few buildings are way taller than the rest, so it would help if the game gave an actual specific altitude (especially since the game tells you what your exact altitude is at all times).

There’s a bomber mission where you have to dodge cones (representing the enemy’s radar), then enter a bombing mode where you just move the left stick and tap the A button when the cursor is over your target buildings. It’s rather dull and unnoteworthy outside of the part where the game makes you fly in one direction before it adds enemy planes to the mission (which you can’t defend yourself from due to having no missiles), only to then put your new destination in the opposite direction of where the game just made you go, barely visible because it’s at the very edge of your radar when it finally decides to show up.

There are also three turret missions, one of which is monochrome, and these are the worst parts of the game since the game never puts icons over enemy units like it does in the other mission types, meaning you can barely see them. It doesn’t help that you only get two pre-set zoom levels instead of an adjustable zoom (you get three in the monochrome one, but if your zoom is too far away, the game straight-up won’t render the smaller enemies). You also don’t get a radar, meaning you’re not going to see where an incoming missile is until it’s too late.

Overall, this game is pretty mediocre. It’s definitely a step up from the previous flight-combat games I’ve played, but it’s gimmicky and has issues with player communication. It might be worth picking up on sale if you haven’t played a flight-combat game yet and are looking to get into the genre (after all, I read that the close combat mechanic isn’t in many other games), but I’m not sure if I can recommend it to others.