A new interpretation to an old series.
ACAH is a western interpretation of a Japanese game series. The classic Ace Combat series did however, have a continuous repeat of the same plot in 4, 5, and 6. Those three games happened in a fictional land where the development team was allowed to go wild-- and this was Assault Horizon's first mistake. They applied a real story-twister by applying AH to a real world scenario. We already know what's going on in the real world, which is why the first non-tutorial mission you end up in the middle-east. If this was "Strangerealm" (AC3-6), then they could think of multiple different conflicts, and not have to be limited to the restricted imagination of a real world scenario. But AC3-6 did always follow the same outline as last time-- a crisis occurs, enemies attack, they have some sort of secret devastating weapon, you disable it later, they have some sort of omega super weapon to end the continent as the last mission. Assault Horizon vaguely follows this same trend-- however the super weapons were pretty boring, and didn't have much flare to them that the super weapons in 3-6 did.
Another thing that agitated me in ACAH was the easily predictable outcome of the story. Anybody who has seen enough media from shows and movies can see the shallow foreshadowing that ACAH provides, and you're pretty much able to determine how this game will end somewhere along the 6th mission (out of... 13, I think). ACAH also lacked some serious character development that was extremely HEAVY in 5, present in 6, and 4 kind of showed you character development from an enemy's point of view. The development in AH was almost non-existent. In fact, it wasn't even there.
The OST in AH was pretty amazing-- it wasn't very 'epic' as compared to Zero or 5, but it was very aggressive and fast-paced, something that AH was aiming for. I haven't found much emotional depth in any of the songs in the OST, but I did find myself repeating three or four songs as they did stand out to me as compared to the rest of the OST.
Finally-- the gameplay. The gameplay of AH is pretty normal when you compare it to the previous installments of Ace Combat. There have been a few new additions in the fray that seem suitable for this particular type of turn the game took. The Dog-Fighting System (DFS) is a scripted battle that takes your plane on a nearly cinematic fast-paced simplified rail-shooter that does offer a bit of eye-candy, but not much depth to the overall gameplay at all. It is nice from a spectator's view, but as a player you kind of feel cheated-- and perhaps a way around this would have been to take off the rail riding in a higher difficulty, just to appease those who did not like it. Your plane also regenerates health significantly quick when you do not take damage-- something you see in many of today's shooters. This offended a lot of veteran AC players, saying that the game is losing all of its depth, and this is something I can partially agree with. For players who haven't experienced another AC game, you would restore your health by going into a designated landing zone which would refill ammo for both your gun and missile cache, and would fully repair your plane (this was not always present on certain missions) all at the sacrifice of a few moments off of your deadline. Once again, a good way around this may have been to remove health restoration at higher difficulties of gameplay.
Overall, the new installment into the AC series is disappointing to those who have been playing the AC series extensively. But those who are just now being introduced to this great series now may not be able to go back and play the PS2 (or 360 for AC6) and enjoy it as much as they did ACAH. For most casual gamers you will either enjoy Post ACAH, or Pre ACAH. However, reviews such as mine may steer the new players away from picking up this game-- and maybe, just maybe they will pick up one of the games that take place in Strangerealm,and Project Aces will see how they can fix all the disappointing features in ACAH-- beginning with the removal of Strangerealm.