icycalm wrote:As for Colony Wars...
...Solid mechanically, but crap in terms of theme and atmosphere...
Agreed, Colony Wars atmosphere was lacking. The ships were pretty ugly too. Psygnosis got good in that regard with Wipeout (because of The Designers Republic involvement).
I had a poster of the front cover of Strike Commander when I was a little kid, didn't knew it was a game!
Looks nice!Have you checked out Gaijin's recent flight games? I loved
IL-2 Sturmovik: Wings of Prey (subtitled "Birds Of Prey" on consoles). Their last game (Birds of Steel) looks even better. I don't know about
Apache: Air Assault though, but at least it doesn't seem as half-assed as Assault Horizon's helicopter missions.
Gaijin Entertainment are not the guys that initiated the IL-2 Sturmovik flight simulators series (Maddox Games did), and they're not trying to cater the pure simulation market. Gaijin's games feature those usually badly implemented settings to play the game with various degrees of realism. I can assume that since they wanted to market their games primarily to consoles, they went great lengths into fine tuning their "arcade" and "realistic" settings, and not so much with their "simulation" ones. These ones enable flight dynamics targeted more towards fans of the first games of the series, while restricting the camera to the cockpit. I haven't played much on this mode.
Namco should take note: the planes actually fucking crash in either mode.
Even on "realistic" the game is deeper than Ace Combat. The planes feature localized damage, and it's great to cut off the wings of another fighter with a burst of machine gun fire. If you get behind someone's smoke trail, the canopy gets dirty and it limits your vision for a while. You can give orders to your squadron and they seem to do a better job of following them than in either Ace Combat that has the command feature.
Wings of Prey takes fun concepts from its pure simulator heritage and it doesn't skimp one bit on action. Birds of Steel features dynamic campaigns, I wonder how well implemented they are.
Gaijin Entertainment did some pretty horrible action games (X-blades) but they're advancing rapidly with their flight games. After Assault Horizon's fiasco and the mediocre competition from Tom Clancy's HAWX, they became my favorite flight game developers.
There are some bad things about Wings of prey:
• If you want cooperative missions, they sell them as an add-on with only a handful of new missions, co-op is never enabled for the rest.
• While the scenery is way more interesting than in Ace Combat 6 (in terms on high ground structures and clouds), the AI never takes advantage of this, either when you're tailing them or to surprise you. That's an enormous missed opportunity.
• Flying the occasional bomber missions is not that fun.
On a side note: If you try it for PC, it forces an install of some bullshit content delivery platform called "YUplay" which is needed for multiplayer and game updates (even if you bought it on Steam), and it's as obtrusive as rape. I shit you not, it makes Origin and Games for Windows live look good.