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.