An attempt to place the Ace Combat universe in the real world, but without excitement or real physics.
Graphically, the game does everything right. The planes look amazing with a wonderful touch which allows you to view each plane during the selection screen. The scenery is breathtaking which makes flying over Dubai and Washington DC especially enjoyable. My one complaint is the oil and blood that appears when you down a plane, as often times they will appear when you are not even near the destroyed planes (such as when firing a missile head-on and then evading).
As beautiful as the game is, the gameplay is tragic. I played on the hard setting, which is the setting I have beaten every other Ace Combat game on. However, whoever decided upon the difficulty settings should be fired. There is absolutely no reason that a game should beat you cheaply. I understand that a hard difficulty should cause you to lose several times, but not in a manner that is entirely unfair.
I speak of unfairness and it directly relates to the physics of the game. On numerous occasions, you will see planes that fly past you only to turn on a dime and engage you in Dog Fight Mode (DFM). In reality, no plane could turn 180 degrees while traveling at 900+ knots. However, you will find this happens a lot in this game.
This failure of physics also applies to the missiles that are fired. On several occasions, when fighting Markov in DFM, Markov was able to fire missiles directly in front of him and they would turn a complete 180 degrees and then turn another 180 degrees a second later to hit the plane. This calls into question the value of the DFM when your plane is not even safe when fighting one-on-one with the enemy in front of you.
As for the DFM, the system is creative but suffers from far too many flaws to be useful. When in DFM, the enemy's wingmen will attack you with missiles. DFM does not provide any means for you to evade the missiles and you must disengage to do so. This is further complicated by the fact that your own wingmen do absolutely nothing during combat. Consistently, Gutierrez would tell me that he had my back only to find 6 enemy planes engaging me constantly, each to fire a missile back-to-back, while I was trying to engage a required target. I found myself often seeking to attack the optional targets while leaving the primary targets for later due to the difficulty of downing a bomber when my wingmen did nothing.
The enjoyability of the game is further complicated by the fact that you must use DFM to destroy several of the enemies throughout the game. Whenever a TGT_LEAD pops up on your screen, you must engage that enemy using the DFM system. Regardless of how many missiles you fire at the enemy outside of DFM, they will always evade the missiles and often in mind boggling ways. With the broken nature of the DFM system, you often find yourself cursing at the screen due to the fact that an enemy is nearly unbeatable and you must die 15 times in DFM before you can beat a target lead.
Even when DFM does work, it does not work like it should. The whole idea is that you are able to engage an enemy up close to increase your chances of hitting a target. When it comes to several targets, you find yourself firing 10 or so missiles at a target to down it. This is ridiculous when you add the fact that your wingmen do not help you. You will often find that only 1 or 2 missiles will down you which only adds to the frustration.
Another issue that constantly arises in DFM and outside DFM is the flares (or chaff) that is intended to help you evade missiles. You only start with 4 to 7 for each mission and they never refill (for enemies, they have an unlimited supply of flares). When you consider that you have to down 30+ planes each mission, it is extremely annoying to run out of flares in the first 2 minutes. Even more frustrating is that fact that flares only work about half the time. If two enemies fire missiles at you at the same time side-by-side and you pop the flares, only one missile will be stopped while the other hits you. This lack of ability to stop missiles is really frustrating when you consider the enemy can pop flares repeatedly to counter a staggered missile fire and they work every time regardless of your distance from the enemy.
The flare situation is only made worse by the fact that you are dealing with missiles that appear out of nowhere from phantom planes that you cannot see and that do not appear on your radar. This aspect only adds to the cheapness of your defeat.
As for the helicopter missions, there are several where you are expected to maintain a low altitude, but you must combat Hind helicopters. In those situations, you are forced to fly higher than the safe altitude to destroy the Hind and then you must find a building to avoid the oncoming missile. Yet another example of the cheapness added by the developers when it comes to the difficulty.
Other than that issue, the helicopter missions are somewhat enjoyable, if not out of place. The controls are crisp and it gives you an often unwanted break from the plane action.
Lastly, come the gunner missions. I found these missions to be a complete waste of time and often detracted from the game, much like how they detract from the game in Call of Duty. In these missions, you are either a Huey gunner or a AC130 gunner. Both positions are boring and feel like they were tacked onto the game by some intern who played too much Call of Duty, but had a "great idea" for the game. In these missions, you have to gun down rebels on a freighter or near the ruins of a town. The only problem is that you have to see the enemies. Often times, you will not see the enemies until they attack you and you must trace back the gunfire to find the position of these enemies. This wouldn't be a problem if you were attacking only one enemy with a SAM, but it seems as though every enemy in these missions came ready for you. As such, you will find several missiles coming at you at once, and if you are lucky enough to survive, you still have to find and attack each of these SAM positions before they fire again.
Ultimately, AC: Assault Horizon is a great attempt to reach out to people who are not into the arcade flight sim genre, but it comes at the cost of alienating a large part of the fan base. If the difficulty wasn't so cheap, I would be inclined to give it more of a try. However, it seems as though the developers thought it better to subtract the unrealistic nature (flying battle fortresses and gigantic submarines with lasers) of the fictional world in previous entries in the series, and add unrealistic physics in the real world of this game. It is extremely tragic the developers decided to create a fictional game in a real world setting that is divorced from the physics and flight mechanics of the world they are trying to mimic. I only hope that Project Aces can get back to the basics that made earlier entries in the series so enjoyable.