Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy Review

As a video game reviewer it's always exciting to go into a game with low expectations and end up impressed. You think you're about to have a bear of time pushing yourself through another underachieving design, but then you're surprised by a truly entertaining product. You get fun when you expected frustration. Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy is the latest game to bring me this feeling.

I didn't have high hopes for Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy on the 3DS because Namco's aerial combat series -- while popular and consistently good on competitor's platforms -- has a terrible track record when it comes to Nintendo's systems. It's a franchise that's ignored Nintendo's consoles entirely in favor of appearing only on Sony and Microsoft machines, and the one time it did come to a Nintendo platform before it was for the flawed Ace Combat Advance -- a 2005 Game Boy Advance release that our review six years ago called "more of a chore than a game."

Well, this new release is no chore at all. I've been having a blast playing Assault Horizon Legacy -- the game that has now, truly, brought Ace Combat to Nintendo fans for the first time.

If you've never paid attention to the brand as it spent years soaring across the different PlayStation and Xbox systems, Ace Combat is a series focused on dog fighting aerial battles taking place between fighter jets. It's somewhat realistic and somewhat not. The storyline in this one, for instance, seems like it could be ripped from today's newspaper headlines -- except that it takes place in a kind of alternate-reality Earth instead of a re-creation of our actual planet.

That half-and-half blend of realism and fantasy bleeds into the gameplay, as the core of controlling your fighter jet is based on the laws and physics that define real-world flight. But then the game stops short of pushing all the way into sim territory, and instead makes some fun-enhancing design choices that bend those laws a bit.

The game ushers you into the cockpit and sends you out on your first mission to get you accustomed to the basics, and controlling your plane through normal movements feels tight and responsive. You can easily glide through the sky, diving and climbing at your whim, and convenient targeting icons make it easy to lock onto enemy aircrafts and dispatch them with either your on-board machine gun or your compliment of heat-seeking missiles.

After getting those basics under your belt, though, Assault Horizon Legacy presents the real meat of the design -- Action Maneuvers. These are stylish, cinematic aerial movement techniques that you can activate when an on-screen meter is fully charged. It charges as you close in on enemies and maintain proximity with them for a few seconds straight. When it's charged, you simply hit the Y Button. The game takes over on auto-pilot for about two seconds while the camera pulls back to show your plane looping, spinning or executing some other kind of insane airborne gymnastics that ends up slipping you right behind your targeted foe with a perfect lock for a missile shot.

It's dynamic. It's bold. It makes you feel like a badass. Longtime fans of the series may end up criticizing their inclusion here -- arguing the brief loss of player control shouldn't occur -- but I love the excitement of these sequences. Perhaps because the 3DS' stereoscopic effect makes them feel so immersive.


Third-party utilization of the 3D effect has been hit or miss on Nintendo's newest handheld so far, but Ace Combat's usage is a surefire hit. The depth that the 3D brings to these dogfights is incredible, and this is one of only very few 3DS titles so far where I've felt comfortable cranking the 3D slider all the way up to its maximum setting. Even the game's mission debriefings and menu screens benefit from the effect, and there are nifty touches like full replays that you can save as 3D videos after clearing each level.

Altogether, Ace Combat offers a great single-player experience. The catch is that it's single-player only. While flight action fans of somewhat similar games like Star Fox 64 3D might expect to be able to face off against friends in 3D dogfights, the option isn't here.

What's more, the single-player story mode isn't all that long. You'll blaze through in no time at all on the game's easiest difficulty setting, though harder modes and the availability of different jets and weapons to purchase during your playthrough make for some replayability. The MSRP seems to acknowledge this somewhat thinner quantity of content compared to 3DS alternatives like Star Fox, since Ace Combat's standard asking price is currently $29.99 -- 10 bucks cheaper than Nintendo's 3DS standard.

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