Ace Combat Infinity for the PS3, Early Review

So I got to playing Ace Combat Infinity, and the first thing I wanted to figure out was if the teasers early on were really about making a real-world version of 4, arguably the most famous entry in the franchise, or was it something else.

The story is kinda like Ace Combat 3.5 (or is it 2.5)? It takes place in the real world, but it's an alternate history deal since the Ulysses1994 incident has happened (they changed the alphanumeric suffix from XF04 to something else I can't recall right now). It's been 20 years since the asteroids hit the earth - the plot of AC04. There isn't one "Stonehenge" (or as they just call it "rail gun facility") but seven, essentially one on every continent, plus an early prototype. But rather than that the focus seems to be a potential for war spawned by the fact that multinational corporations that took over after governments collapse after the asteroid disaster... in other words, the back story for AC03. You, however, are a mercenary working for a organization called Arrows, your callsign is Reaper, and you're running missions on the behalf of the UN to stop terrorists (the plot from AC02). 

The game mechanics in terms of flight are good. It's what you expect from a more classical AC game. They kept the "High-G" turn function from AC06, but they've dulled it a little so it's not as dramatic. Like AC04 and earlier games you have allies, but you don't control them or anything, although interestingly they retain a form of the ally assist function from AC06, in that your specs get a slight boost when your allies are in a certain range (missiles lock faster, track better, replenish faster, etc). The call it datalink (again something talked about in AC03). 

Here's the thing about the free-to-play model; there really doesn't seem to be anything in the game right now that you cannot get by simply playing the game enough to get it. It's certainly more work than if it were a regular game, but it's doable. That won't be the case a year from now. 

You have 2 types of "fuel", supplied and stocked. You start with, and can carry a maximum of, 3 units of supplied fuel. It costs one unit to play any mission, whether it's campaign or the online- co-op. Every 4 hours you automatically get back one unit (don't know if the timer stops when you're not playing, which would suck big time). You get "stocked" fuel for completing challenges. These can be anything from simply checking all the notifications in the inbox, to completing certain objectives in co-op mode. I don't think there is a limit on that one, but it doesn't automatically replenish itself. I played five hours today. There are only two campaign missions at the start and you finish those in only about 20 minutes, tops. I stopped after five hours because I ran out of fuel and it was going to be at least three and a half hours before I got even one more.

You get money, but in campaign mode you don't get near enough. I made the mistake of using up a fuel unit replaying the first mission to get an S. You only get a few hundred dollars. To unlock the third mission, there is some innocuous thing or another you have to do, plus pay 200,000 credits. You start the game with only 90,000, and I spent most of what i earned in those 5 hours just moving from an F-4 Phantom you start with to an F-16, just so you can stand a chance in the co-op mode. In co-op mode you regularly get tens of thousands of credits. 

The problem is, you need enough people online to get into a mission. You need 4,6, or 8 for a mission, and you end up sitting around waiting for a room to fill up with enough people, then everyone to get ready for the mission... again, tedious and boring. But I did manage to do a fair number of missions and make some reasonable progress for what progress there is to be had. But you look at a year from now, or even a few months from now, this game becomes impossible to play if they don't have enough people online or they don't start adding some free solo missions to the mix. You CANNOT play this game without online co-op. It's just not possible. Almost all the challenges for the stocked fuels involve either using credits to buy stuff, or completing something in co-op mode. It costs hundreds of thousands of credits to unlock proceeding campaign missions, and  you only get a few hundred for the trouble. 

The selection of aircraft, once you get them, is not too bad, but is still a very far cry from the likes of AC05 and Zero where you had something like 50 variants of planes to choose from. Planes and weapons are unlocked through an RPG like branching tree system, the planes, weapons, and upgrades replacing RPG stat boosts and ability unlocks. By using a plane and completing missions you collect research on that plane and the next items on its particular branch. Once that's completed you buy the completed research project (the aircraft or upgrade) or the next level of said aircraft. It pays to peruse the entire diagram before making your purchases so that you can head to your preferred aircraft. I like the F-22, so that's the branch I'm working on and it's the last plane on that branch. There are at least a half dozen steps along the way, each requiring you to purchase the item to unlock the remainder of that branch's path. If you don't do your due diligence in plotting your course, you're likely to run into money woes later on. You really don't want to swing around from branch to branch. 

But, the missions are interestingly entertaining. There seems to be a definite AI scaling involved, so you don't set the difficulty level, they match the enemy AI to you. You aren't fighting other players in co-op, you're forming two air units (two people and two cpus, thee people and one cpu, or four people), and both trying to complete a given mission, the team with the higher score at the end of the time limit receiving bonus credits for being the winner, the single person with the highest score receiving even more credits. They have some famous super-enemies from the series show up in diminished capacities. For example, there is a "surprise" special mission that you might get offered every few co-op missions where everyone is on the same team and you're flying out to face the Aigaion flying fortress and its escort jammer and heavy fire super ships, although they once again give it a generic name (flying fortress instead of Aigaion). In another mission, I forgot which now, the last couple minutes you're fighting a "carrier sub" that launches UAVs and wide-area, aerial detonating munitions... yeah, it's the Scinfaxi/Hrimfaxi mission out of AC5.

You really don't need to be particularly engaged with your teammates to be effective so long as you pay attention to what's going on. They'll usually be off doing their own thing. there will be a blue arrow on the targeting box of your enemies if you have a teammate locked on that target. If your rival team is locked on, the arrow will be white. It's better to go after those since it would stop you opponents from gaining points, and you'll get points for stealing their kills. If you're skilled and switch targets quickly, and you keep an eye out for where your teammates are, you can pick your own spot to tear through the weaklings. But, for something more difficult, you'd like to have the chat function working and be with friends or be able to get on the same page. The Aigaion mission for example, you'd like to have a coordination so that some people are attacking the flying fortress and its support ships, while a couple others at least are busy taking out the escort fighter planes.

Unfortunately there are only 5 maps for the co-op mode, so the variety mainly comes from the same sort of variety you get replaying any traditional set of five missions of past AC games. I suppose there is some variety in the fact that your wingmen will differ and do things different, forcing you to do things different, but it's not too hard to see that being a very minor consolation after doing that for several hours. It clearly promotes the idea of you paying for the extra stocked fuel so you don't have to work so hard to get to missions, or to spend real money for the enhanced rate of development of research, which means you'd be doing less missions to unlock parts and planes on your tech branch. It feels really odd though that there is literally a mechanism built into a game by which you pay money to be able to play the game less. 

I'm excited for the potential of the game because when you're playing it and not worrying about all that other stuff it does feel like a truly good, classic, Ace Combat game. There is enough of a taste to leave you wanting to play this game. But at the moment, after 5 hours, most of which was spent waiting to get into a room and start a mission in co-op mode, I can already see the "end" of the game in terms of running out of stuff to do, or patience to do it. It is at the point right now that I can do only 1 mission every four hours, maybe a few more if I can game my way to extra stocked fuel. In other words, it is unlikely that one my next day off, if I have five hours to burn away, it won't be in Infinity... because I will literally be unable to unless I spend real-world money to do it. I know there are those who are gonna say that's the cost of free-to-play. I say they should've just made a regular game.

I can go back and replay Ace Combat 3, 4, 5, 0, 6 if I wanted to and have as much fun as is to be had doing so right now, or five years from now, starting up a new file and playing through the game unlocking and collecting everything. I don't know that Infinity will last a full year, because if you don't have the co-op mode to play with, which means if you don't have enough other people around the world at the same time on the servers to join a mission, this game cannot be played. It simply is not possible. You cannot go back and restart this game from scratch if you spend money on buying upgrades or paying to unlock tech branches. Becuase the only way forward then is to do the same thing all over again. $1 here, a couple more there, before long you've spent $20 or $30. And so you arrive at another odd quirk, a paradox of this game; you are forced to ostensibly replay this game over and over to make it to its end, but once you do you'll probably never be able to play it again. Welcome to the future. It's kinda terrible here.