A great game for Ace Combat veterans and new players alike, lacking only the variety of its predecessors.
Numerous improvements have been made since the last AC console entry, Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War. The graphics are great, the story is gripping, and the larger, albiet less fleshed out, cast really draws you into the missions. The biggest improvement, however, is the feeling of being the only competent plane on your team is gone; instead, it feels like you are fighting in a full scale war as part of an actual battalion. You are still the top ace (obviously), but now you have several other squadrons of fighters and platoons of ground troops to support and be supported by - your squad can actually fight this time around! You can sick 'em on any enemies in front of you or tell them to kill any bogeys at your 6 (enemies behind you for all you non-flight people), but only after you've helped them clear their own operations first.
The game is much less linear than others in the series. Each mission is usually divided up into several different operations, all of which are occuring at the same time. You get to choose which parts of the overall battle you want to take part in and in what order, which is a nice change of pace from the usual "go here, kill these tanks, then go here and kill these planes". If you dont support your allies well or dont finish an operation quickly enough you can fail an operation, but you can still pass the mission by completing enough of the other ones. I preferred dogfighting to bombing missions, so I would always seek out as many Air-to-Air operations as I could, but it was still pretty rewarding to drop bombs on enemy tanks from high up above.
The game is a little on the easy side, but is not without its difficult moments. I spent a solid hour and a half on one mission trying it over and over again, but the amazing thing was that it was still a lot of fun. Sure, I died a lot, but the deaths were never cheap; either I didnt completely avoid an incoming missile or I crashed into a command cruiser while dogfighting with enemy fighters or I stalled too close to the ground and got gunned down by turrets. I was in complete control of my triumphs and my defeats. The only time I got truly frustrated was on the last level with the highest difficulty on, since my plane had such little health that a few bullets from the overpowered turrets would down me in seconds, but I revised my strategy to avoid them and came out victorious in the end. You might end up saying that the average enemy pilot isnt too hard to out maneuver, but once you face off with the skilled pilots of the Strigon team, you'll be wishing you hadn't said anything - they're almost as skilled as you are at dodging missiles (it's not really that hard anyway), so it'll take some careful flying and positioning to take one out, let alone an entire squadron.
The voice acting is pretty good overall for the pilots, and really adds to the feel of you being a part of a larger strike force, not just your immediate squad - the fact that I can list off callsigns of allies like Sky Kid, Avalanche, Snake Pit, Ghost Eye, Quox, Warlock is a testament to the quality of their cocky banter over the radiowaves. I dont particularly care for the voice acting of the non-action parts though - the mission overseer telling me that he's disappointed with me for disobaying his orders sounds the same as him congratulating me on a job well done.
The game has decent replayability, as you unlock Expert by beating Hard, and Ace by beating Expert. However, the game does get significantly easier once you've played through once since all of your credits and planes rollover, and even easier once/if you unlock this game's superplane, the CFA-44 Nosferatu, so much so that beating Ace using the nosferatu was about the same difficulty as beating Hard my first runthrough (however, my first runthrough I didnt know how to activate my squadron's attack and defense orders since I didnt do the tutorial, so I pretty much had to do everything on my own). There's also a hidden enemy ace on every level for you to find and take down, but they're not too hard to find - just hard to kill.
The only thing I really didn't like was the lack of plane variety. In previous games there have been dozens of planes to choose from, but in this one there are only 15. My personal favorite, the Mig-31 Foxhound, didnt make the cut =(. Also, the multiplayer is pretty dead and there is no split screen, so this is pretty much a single player experience.
Overall this is a great game. If you are a fan of the series, or are just plain intrigued by the idea of doing barrel rolls in an F-22A Raptor at well over the speed of sound, be sure to pick this one up.