If any game reinforces the rent before you buy rule, this one does.
There are a couple of features that I liked but the rest of the game was seriously dissappointing. It just seemed like right off the bat all you were doing was shooting at ground targets with a single digit number of enemy planes thrown into the mix. The storyline was deathly boring. I thought this going to go into the background of Pops and Bartlet from Ace Combat 5 but instead all the focus goes onto your character and that he is only known as the "Demon Lord". The story is so focused on your character that it hardly goes into the background of the Belkan war at all. To tell you the truth i think you could learn more about the Belkan war from Ace Cobat 5. The story lacks any substance into what was happening. Its missions didn't have any creativity. In one mission your objective is to fly to a waypoint and all of sudden your trying to shoot down target planes. Its nothing like the setups from 5 where you get to do a ceremonial flyby over a stadium and all of sudden it leads to a huge aerial battle over a major metropolitan area.
The things i did like was you could select from 3 different special weapons for each plane and that were more planes. I also liked dogfighting with enemy ace squadrons. it was one of the few times in the game where it was actually entertaining.
The Good: More planes, more specail weapons, good dogfights against enemy ace squadrons.
The Bad: Really poor story, felt like all you were doing was shooting at ground targets.
So I don't even reccommend renting this game let alone buying it.