PlayStation Portable
Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception
| Graphics: Sound: Gameplay: Overall: |
8.56 8.56 8.75 8.63 |
| Votes: | 63 |
| Reviews: | 1 |
Rate this game
Review this game
| Reviewer: Twomuchrice | Date: May 28, 2024 |
| Ace Combat is a wonderful series. I haven't the slightest interest in fighter jets and after playing every Ace Combat game I could get my hands on, I still don't really care about fighter jets. However, I do care about Ace Combat.
Ace Combat is a series where you play as an elite pilot in the war-torn world of Strangereal, taking on dangerous missions to steer the course of the war in your country's favor. All of the games are rather loosely connected, so playing them in any kind of order is not terribly important, though if you had to start somewhere, start with the PS2 "Holy Trinity" of Ace Combat 4, Ace Combat 5, and Ace Combat 0. They are excellent games. I'm not here to talk about those games, though. This is a review of the PSP entry in the Ace Combat series, Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception. Graphics: 7 In terms of graphics, I'm not sure this is the prettiest PSP game I've ever played, but most PSP games aren't much to look at anyways. It's comparable to its PS2 counterparts, but falls a bit short in visual fidelity. Nothing about the graphics hold the game back and it actually has its nice looking moments from time to time. There's a mission where you blow up military power plants to shut down a huge signal jammer in a snowy mountain range that looks very nice despite all of the technical limitations of the PSP's hardware. Sound: 9 The OST is great. This is just par for the course with Ace Combat titles, all of them have incredible soundtracks. You've got cinematic and heroic orchestral tracks reminiscent of action movies as well as some drum and bass electronic tracks that are just transcendent to listen to while flying fast and blowing things up. Ace Combat titles tell each mission's story through radio chatter, while also telling an overarching story through expository cutscenes. The cutscenes have nice audio quality, no complaint there, but the radio chatter and mission briefings take a hit in audio quality, presumably to save space on the physical UMD the game would be loaded on. The audio quality being a bit crusty didn't take much away from the overall experience, but it did stand out when it happened. Gameplay: 10 The campaign is a collection of tried and true Ace Combat mission formulas. The missions were consistent with the quality I've come to expect from the series. One fun thing about this game's campaign is that your decisions will influence how certain missions will play out. There are forking paths in the campaign that ultimately all lead to the same endpoint, but the order in which you approach the missions can cause another mission's objectives to change, so there is a bit of replay value in the campaign if you wish to see all the possible permutations of each mission. Overall: 7 I thought the narrative for this entry was a bit weak, but the gameplay was nice. Not much else to say about this title that I haven't already said. I'd recommend checking it out if you've played all of the numbered titles in the series, but only if you're itching for Ace Combat gameplay. You'll have to find a good Ace Combat narrative somewhere else. I'd strongly recommend against making this your first Ace Combat game. |
|