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Review of the Campaign


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I've always preferred cinematic narratives to dry milsim exercises when it comes to campaigns, so this seemed custom made for me.

People have mentioned that the missions are short, only 30 minutes or so. What you don't realise is that you will be constantly carrying out actions for those 30 minutes. It's only from playing this campaign that I realised how much downtime you have in others, transitioning between waypoints and waiting for long radio exchanges to carry out. Even the default "scramble" missions that come with the F18 have or Baltic Dragon's story-heavy campaigns have lots of downtime circumnavigating the map. 30 minutes of frantically clicking switches and designating targets is plenty. And they're more fun to replay.

This is more Eagle Dynamics' fault but some of the weapons the campaign has you employ early on are ones there are no tutorial missions for (seriously, there are so many weapons not covered at all. Even the Weapon Qualification missions don't cover everything). Thank #### for Chuck's Guides.

The voice acting ingame is fine, so's the translation except when it comes to anything relating to original terms such as the sci-fi energy source everyone's fighting over or strangereal countries & factions. There's a few times where it's obvious the voice actors had no idea what context the lines were being delivered in. Translation for the visual novels is considerably worse but you get the gist of it. The voice acting for the VN cutscenes are Chinese only and are your typical shallow VN fluff. The video files are labelled "VN_Before_M1", _M2, etc and I made the mistake of thinking that the first mission was "M1" when it's the Prologue, so I was watching them out of sync for like the first 4 missions. Sucks that the DCS engine has no native video playing ability.

The story ends on a cliffhanger but it's really hard to care. The action arc ends at an adequate point though. You start killing drones, level up to mixed AA/AG missions and finally start taking on squadrons of F15s and Su-27s. I never thought I'd be good enough to tangle with multiple F15s or MiGs simultaneously and come out alive but I managed to do it multiple times in this campaign. Would have preferred more missions but who doesn't want more content for less money...?

I would say the best mission and most Ace Combat-like was Mission 8. 

Spoiler

It's a night-time CAS mission for the capture of an enemy airbase. You fly through a canyon with your wingmen before popping up and dropping some pre-programmed bombs. Then the battle starts in earnest with ground forces giving lots of chatter, explosions and tracers flying everywhere. A Kiowa circles the base, using a laser that's visible on your NVG to highlight targets for you to CCIP until the way is clear and your forces penetrate the base. I know the air defenses are probably programmed to miss me and that my teammates are invulnerable, but it doesn't matter, it feels good.

It captures the most important aspect of Ace Combat missions: narrative (something I didn't realise until they took it away in Ace Combat 6, but that's another story). Telling convincing 30 second stories of all these squads and teams in the air and on the ground and making you feel like an integral part of a larger war machine. Of course, this requires lots of good scripting, voice over work, and finely-tuned gameplay, so only some of the missions achieve this. You can tell some missions received less love than others and that they were squeezed for dev time.

I would have actually liked more landing requirements. Typically missions will immediately end once all your objectives are complete even if you're in the middle of enemy territory. I personally enjoy how involved landings are and doing them over and over in campaigns is usually how I get good at them.

More campaigns should have ingame music. ED now need to add a separate option to disable menu music.

Mid-mission "checkpoints" are indeed handy. They're not perfect and some of their spacing is questionable. They're actually just separate missions configured to start halfway through, so plane status, expended weapons, kills, etc aren't carried over. But it was definitely better to have them than not have them.

Given how other modules have missions that let you choose different planes (of the same module but different configuration) to possess, it feels it might be possible to let the player pick a jet from the different modules they have installed and are loadout-suitable. That would give it a more Ace Combat feel. I would have liked to go Harrier or JF-17 in some of the missions. Obviously there would have to be one plane that would be suitable for all missions due to how campaigns have to be attached to a module.

My reviews might come of as negative because I will highlight every instance something could have been improved, but it was definitely worth a buy.

  • Like 3

Would like to see:

Panavia Tornado

Panther AS565

English Electric Lightning.

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  • FrankMT featured and pinned this topic

Temp89,

 

A well thought and very constructive review.

Thank you very much for playing!

 

We have taken notes and will improve on those points in future projects.

 

I have also pinned your review.

 

Best,

FrankMT

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