Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown review

Ace Combat 7 is an arcade fighter jet action game with a thirst for explosions. You will pilot realistic planes with unrealistic handing in a made-up world, which as you can guess, is at war. It’s a fun game that can be picked up for an hour and is highly addictive and entertaining.

Ace Combat has minute to minute action. Pretty much the first time you get to control one of the jets, you are straight into the action. Ace Combat makes you feel like you are an ace pilot, which the game achieves by providing fluid controls, countless enemy targets, and a lot of missiles which you get to shoot them down with. I suppose it feels a little like Call of duty in the air.

Like the popular FPS, Ace Combat 7 runs extremely smooth, and features crisp visuals. The planes themselves are extremely detailed and feel very realistic to look around. Physical clouds add a new element to gameplay by acting as a makeshift cover if you have a bogey on your tail, and they can also play havoc with your aircraft. If I must give any criticism to the visuals of the game, it would be the lack of ground detail. But this is rather unfair as it is an air combat game after all, so you don’t really notice it, unless you must destroy ground-based enemies.

Whilst on the subject of missions, there’s a decent variety of locations and objectives here. Flying at low altitude to launch a surprise attack on the enemy was a personal favourite, whilst others force you to get close to unknown aircraft to find out if they are friend or foe. Overall the campaign is fun, but some of the objectives can be a tad frustrating, with certain scores needed to be reached in a difficult time.

Whilst this is frustrating, completing the missions are satisfying, and you can always replay them to improve your rank and earn more MRP. This is an in-game currency which you can spend on upgrading a whole range of special weapons and some awesome new parts. You have to upgrade your aircraft to stay ahead of the enemy in the campaign, but all of your unlocks carry over to the multiplayer, so spending time on upgrades is worthwhile.

The multiplayer allows up to eight players to dogfight in either a Battle Royale or Team Deathmatch. While there are only two modes to play, the online seems to be pretty robust, and I didn’t run into many issues at all. It balances your aircrafts loadout by assigning it a cost, which lobby creators can set restrictions on in order to prevent veterans from using top tier equipment.

Now onto the PSVR support. Its set a few years before the events of the main campaign, there are a few missions to fly in virtual reality, so if you own the tech, it’s well worth jumping into the cockpit and giving it a go. The controls are identical to the regular game, but you’re forced into a first-person view, and for me, it’s visually fantastic. Just beware of the motion sickness. I could only last 1 mission at a time before having to switch it off.