Ace Combat X: Skies of deception
For PSP.
Verdict: Tiny shiny model planes.
Rating: 4/5
Like me, It’s been many a lad’s unfulfilled dream to be a pilot - to experience the thrill of hurtling through the sky, free as a bird under face flapping G’s and the sound of Kenny Login’s ‘Danger Zone’ rattling through our collective brains.
Thankfully, as I am oft known to champion, videogames can allow me to chase such flights of fancy (see what I did there?). To dog-fight in the sky at the cost of pocket money and not blood is a good thing indeed and so is Ace Combat X.
As one of the remaining fighter pilots of a nation under siege, Skies of deception places you into a tactical war of resistance. With a tinge of sci-fi, it mixes up licensed real-world aircraft with giant ships, outlandish weaponry and the ability to tune and tweak your own flying machines to deliver the most effective vengeance upon the enemy.
Using a branching mission structure, Ace Combat allows you to decide upon the route to victory - each decision has cause and effect on subsequent missions and how the story of retaliation plays out. While the true path to glory is a linear one the branching missions serve to create the illusion of choice and offer alternate routes when others are too difficult.
Featuring a surprisingly varied selection of missions you can expect anything from low level strikes through canyons to tackling the might of a cloaking, heavily armed flying fortress in one evolving mission to save a city from destruction.
Alongside the variety of missions and aircraft the game also boasts a surprisingly high level of production. The front end is stylish, the graphics are a testament to the PSP’s capabilities and the amount of dialogue crammed into one disk is just showing off.
Ace Combat’s attempt at crafting a story of political power games doesn’t engage as well as its gameplay though and with missions peaking a little too early on you may need to have a love of air combat to see it through to the end. But then that’s probably why you’ll buy it in the first place.

Crackdown
For Xbox 360.
Verdict: Throws sand in face of other boxes.
Rating: 4/5
Like the bold black outlines of its comic book aesthetics, Crackdown is a confident title with scant regard for plot or character development. Ditching gaming’s b-movie level of narratives, Crackdown simply offers you the premise of blowing stuff up, a lot.
As a genetically enhanced super cop you’re asked to rid a vast city of its organised crime by what ever means necessary. Using your super powered strength and agility you can leap great heights, clime vast skyscrapers, throw cars around like they’re toys and raise a middle finger to the laws of gravity and gang culture.
Beyond obliterating gangs and such distractions as car and roof top races, Crackdown uses achievements to milk it’s explosive play set. Encouraging playful experimentation and exploration it invites the careful orchestration of chained explosions, improbable vehicle stunts and parquor style street running.
Like Will o’ the wisps, agility orbs are enticingly scattered across the city’s roof tops and encourage obsessive/compulsive exploration of its vast skyline in return for the immediately satisfying increase in jumping prowess.
Introducing this unexpected platforming element and offering the kind of action that gaming has promised for years, Crackdown is free from the binds of gravity and real world physics and successfully entices you to vault around its massive comic book city with great abandon and a voracious ability for destruction like no other medium can offer.
Controls are a thankful move forward for the sandbox genre but Crackdown is mired by its ridiculous AI and the missed opportunities its sequel will undoubtedly deliver. Online co-op play redeems any issues though because having a super friend in the city can only mean twice as much fun.
With video games taking baby steps in striving to deliver emotive and artistically relevant work it’s refreshing to play a game that doesn’t think it’s bigger than its boots. Crackdown is a playground that relies on the imaginative use of explosives and the sheer pleasure of defying reality - sometimes you just need escape from the real world, not a deeper understanding of it.