Reviewed: March 6, 2005
Reviewed by: Loki

Publisher
Namco

Developer
Human Soft

Released: February 22, 2005
Genre: Flight Action
Players: 1
ESRB: Everyone

5
6
6
6
5.8
Ace Combat is one of those instantly recognizable names like Gran Turismo that everyone who has ever played a video game knows (or at least knows of) and much like GT, is always associated with the PlayStation. Now Namco, with the help of Human Soft bring this epic flight series to the GBA with Ace Combat Advance.

In the year 2032, globalization has blurred the borders between countries, and multinational corporations have become worldwide economic superpowers. General Resources Ltd., one of these superpowers, uses state of the art military equipment and their Air Strike Force (A.S.F.) to destroy anybody who could potentially pose a threat to their superiority.

A new international military is created to fight back, spearheaded by an elite fighter squadron called the United Air Defense (U.A.D.). As the newest pilot, you must help your squadron destroy the ASF and bring General Resources Ltd. to their knees.

This new and more portable edition of Ace Combat features:

  • Brand New Missions. Embark on 12 brand-new missions in the Ace Combat universe. Pilot a total of 10 selectable planes in two levels of difficulty: Novice and Ace.
  • High-Action Air Combat. Destructible buildings and objects; bomb enemy strongholds and destroy the enemies defenses. Easy, practical controls put players right in the action.
  • Earn Special Unlockables. Destroy enough planes to earn an 'S' ranking during missions to unlock new planes.
  • Detailed Free-Roaming Environments. Fly air-to-air and air-to-ground missions over detailed arctic, forest, ocean, and desert environments.
From the very first few screens Ace Combat will get most gamers pretty excited. You get some nice artwork, excellent pre-mission flight-prep screens where you pick your plane and weapons, and you even get an informative mission brief with map.

But once the game (and your plane) takes off you are instantly taken back 20 years in game design and visuals. With very few exceptions, Ace Combat looks and plays much like the classic Xevious game, also available on the GBA.

Ace Combat is a top-down game that lets you fly the plane in any direction at high or low altitude. You engage planes in the high (default) altitude and can dive down to bomb or strafe ground targets. The main problem here is that the altitude is not a toggle so you have to keep pushing “up” on the D-pad to maintain your low altitude and if you want to maneuver you have to push left or right while keeping “up” held down. It’s not very accurate and actually a bit painful on the thumb after a few missions.

You have no speed control over your plane other than your afterburners, which will accelerate you until the meter tops out then you slow down to your default cruise speed. Even with full afterburners you can seldom catch escaping planes, and they will often just lead you away from the main mission patch and drain precious seconds from your timer.

The enemies are quite difficult, especially the ground forces that can shoot at you regardless of your altitude. Planes seldom gave me problems, as they would fly in, flash their afterburners then take off trying to lure me away. Ground forces, including many of my mission objective targets would chink away at my armor until I was practically dead after each waypoint.

Thankfully you can repair and rearm in mid-mission by calling “Mother”. With a tap of the “select” button a large plane will appear in the area and depending on how hostile the territory, you will have only a few moments to “dock” and fix yourself up. I found no limit to the number of times I could call “Mother” during a mission, which was good because I was calling her after nearly every multi-target objective.

I guess my main gripe with Ace Combat Advance is that there is very little gameplay or skill involved, mainly due to the simplistic design. You have no countermeasures so you simply suck up the damage the enemy delivers then repair as needed. Aside from possibly picking the proper plane and ammo for each mission there is no real strategy involved, and once the game starts even reflexes don’t seem to make much difference thanks to the awkward controls.

My final complaints would have to deal with no link cable multiplayer and the archaic save system that requires you to enter PASSWORDS to resume your games. I’m sorry, when I’m playing portable games I shouldn’t have to be required to have a pen and paper handy. Use the cartridge memory or stay at home, designers.

Ace Combat Advance uses the GBA’s Mode 7 graphics to create scrolling top-down environments that pretty much look like the graphics from any 80’s coin-op arcade game. This game isn’t pushing the GBA to any limits and actually looks surprisingly bland for a 2005 title on a system that’s nearing the end of its lifespan.

The images are crisp but not that colorful or even that interesting. Enemy types all share the same sprite-like image and most of the enemies share the same color palette as the backgrounds, so you can’t always see them until it’s too late. The levels are large, but aside from the main objectives there isn't much reason to sightsee, not that the mission time allows for straying off course too much.

The radar is certainly useful since the horizontal orientation of the GBA screen doesn’t give you much time to react to approaching planes or ground targets. Once they are on your screen you had better already be firing, which means you have to guess their location and start firing before you see them. The rest of the HUD has your aircraft status, afterburner meter, and a pop-up area for incoming communication.

The music starts off with a techno-military style tune then degrades to some repetitious arcade music that is certainly more inventive than the old-school arcade games but nonetheless repetitive.

There is a subdued engine noise that changes when you hit the afterburner and semi-authentic machine gun fire and rocket whooshes when you fire those weapons, plus a terribly annoying klaxon warning when the enemy has you in its sights – which is usually the moment you enter the same screen.

Ace Combat Advance delivers a single mode of play with 12 missions making up the single campaign. Each mission is 5-10 minutes long and you can multiply that by numerous retry attempts as you learn the controls and die over and over again because of the cheap shot AI.

Each mission is graded on your performance and earning an S ranking will unlock additional planes. This may or may not be incentive enough to replay the missions to perfection. Personally, I was happy just to complete most of them.

I’ve played the last two Ace Combat games on the PS2 and they were challenging and fun, but everything I liked about those games seems to have been stripped away to make this fit on a GBA cartridge. The story has been whittled away to the barest of plots, just enough to tie the missions together, and the movies and voice acting are obviously gone.

GBA-owning Ace Combat fans will certainly want to avoid this title and hope for something better when the PSP releases. I’ll give Namco an E for effort, but just because a gaming system exists doesn’t necessarily mean your game needs to be ported over to it. Ace Combat Advance just seems like a "crash and burn" attempt to milk an established license on an aging handheld platform.