Get in your plane and fight against camera and control problems in this awful flight simulator.
(-) camera is jerky and extremely difficult to navigate; controls are overly complex and further contaminate the camera problems; abysmal interface
Ace Combat 4: Shattered Skies is a flight simulator where you take the role of a pilot to dog fight against enemy planes. This genre sounds really hard hitting and extremely fun, because who wouldn't want to breeze through wide open skies at high speeds and watch enemy planes shoot down from their missiles? But it seems this is pretty difficult for any video game developer to execute, because so many things can go wrong. I've already played Heatseeker on the Nintendo Wii hoping it would be good, and I was let down miserably by camera and control problems. And what seems really sad is this game has most of the same problems, therefore there may very well never be a flight simulator that is truly worth playing.
At first time placing this game in your Playstation 2, it's likely that you'll jump by the incredibly irrelevant and out-of-place girl-band techno music that pops out of nowhere. Then as you begin your first play-through, you choose the mission mode. A story for a game like this seems un-necessary, but despite that it seems to have one. As weirdly executed through a hand-drawn slide-show, you take the role of a boy you one day watched from ground as two planes assaulted one another in the sky, then one crashed where his family had lived. With this heart-break, he got on a plane called Mobius 1 in an effort to defeat enemy planes, perhaps to get vengeance.
Excuse the irrelevance, but the story mode consists of several missions where you defeat enemies either flying in other planes of on ground and sea. All the missions are timed based, and you should also protect your team-mates whenever possible. As you progress through the game, there are a total of 30 different various skies and environments, but you'd be very hard pressed to strain yourself long enough to gander the skill necessary to get passed the fifth level, let alone to the thirtieth.
This is because the game has very difficult controls. Even know using the square button to shoot missiles and X to shoot your machine gun, and a shoulder button to do a speed up seem basic by practice, the game is still over complicated by the turning mechanic. It is very difficult to align your target just right, and even more difficult to keep it aligned when you spot an enemy.
The controls problems are made even worse by camera problems, and sadly they go hand and hand. It takes a lot of movement to turn your plane all the way around if you need to, and as you try and accurately target opponents the camera will sometimes fight with you, as if they placed some kind of evil exploit device in your plane. As a result, you'll find yourself fumbling with the controls more than occasionally, and it really vitally drains the fun that could be had by an otherwise terrific game.
Although Shattered Skies suffers from camera and control problems, its a very pretty game to watch. The environments near the ground are pretty plain to the point they look like a map, but the skies are crisp and clear and the planes are elegantly detailed. It also runs at 60 frames per second, which means everything is moving as smoothly as this generation's hardware can allow. The only thing going against the visuals are grids onscreen that identify your plane's altitude, which although can be helpful they are often distracting.
Choosing between the few game modes will be a very degrading and stressful chore, thanks the the game's completely horrific interface. The on-screen text is pretty small and can be very difficult to read on smaller television sets. Also, some screens are cluttered with so much information that it will take you a lengthy toilet sitting to read it all, yet you only have playable access to one single menu. Even worse, there's absolutely no way to go back to the game's front menu after you play through single player mode! What the hell? It's inexcusable to make the interface as un-functional and punishing as this, and even though fixing it would only make it a tint more enjoyable.
The multiplayer efforts were pretty solid though. You have various game modes, some call for who can destroy the most targets, some are full scale plane fights with different AI controlled opponents at once, and there are also one-on-one competitions. But it's likely both of you will be fighting with the camera and controls more than each other, which is still fair competition but its a pretty crushing disappointment that two people can't casually play the game without putting week's worth of hours getting past the insurmountable learning curve.
I felt a little melancholia inside as I played through Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies. I have no interest in trashing the game with a continuum of complaints and swear words, because I really wanted to like this game. But the unbelievable interface, jerky camera and bad controls kill the chance of that happening. Although most if not all people will be good at the game if they invest time playing through it, it simply isn't enjoyable to play and more than anything it's a test of patience and nerves. There really needs to be an actually functional and somewhat basic game in this jet sim genre, it must be possible, but if the two games I played are any indication, then there never will be.