Ace Combat 6 Demo Impressions

The Ace Combat 6 - Fires of Liberation demo has been around for a few weeks now and I thought I'd give it a go. It's a fairly small download at 309 MB but the demo still gives you a good dose of gameplay.

The game is a flight sim, but it is only semi-realistic and although the countries and places are fictional the aircraft in the game are based on realistic designs. The demo allows you to sample the first mission from the campaign mode entitled "Invasion of Gracemaria" and as you're scrambled from your airbase it sees you defending the skies from a hostile invasion.

The controls are fairly complex to start with and make use of most buttons on the Xbox 360 controller, but they are not too overbearing and once you've had some time with the game you will soon get the hang of it. Additionally the demo provides either "Normal" or "Novice" difficulty levels with novice providing slightly easier flight controls so you don't have to worry about yaw control.

I found while playing the demo I relied heavily on missiles rather than the aircraft cannon and luckily, as it's only semi-realistic, you get a healthy supply of ammunition which didn't come close to running out.



The game runs very smoothly with great graphics overall, and it's only when you get really low do you find that some of the ground scenery for the city (not objects such as buildings) are just textures. I thought the backing track and sound FX all suited the game and there's quite a lot of background chatter going on between pilots to add to the atmosphere. However I found I didn't really hear what was said most of the time as I was concentrating on taking out the next target.

Initially I was disappointed with the camera views on offer as I thought the default chase view was the only one available but after a some experimentation I found that you could change the views between "chase", "cockpit" or "HUD" via pressing the right joystick control.

Overall I enjoyed this taster of the game and I'll be keeping an eye on it as the release date approaches later this year.